“It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Novelists, as Jane Austen so rightly wrote in Northanger Abbey, are expected to have a thorough understanding of human nature and convey this through their works. They have to understand what can motivate not just one or two people, but a host of different characters. If characters act implausibly or inconsistently with their previously established traits, readers are put off. We don't expect characters to act like us, but they need to act like real people. In many ways then, an author needs to be an amateur psychologist. They need to understand cognitions and emotions, personality and memory and weave it all together to produce that most magical of creations, a character that seems as real to us as people we know.
Jane Austen was certainly a master as this kind of magic. When we think of Lizzy Bennet, we feel like we know what it would be like to have her as a friend. We can imagine what she would say or do in scenarios that were certainly never depicted in Pride and Prejudice. She is endowed with such a rich personality that she is no longer confined to the pages of a book, she is free to wander across our imaginations. And it isn't just heroines that Jane Austen could depict with such skill. To me, Lucy Steele is one of the most interesting villains/foils in the Austen canon. She is such a master of manipulation and psychological warfare that her torture of Elinor is almost a form of art. I could imagine Lucy working for the CIA, breaking people and extracting information from them with an ease that would dazzle her colleagues.
Edward looks upon yourself and the other Miss Dashwoods quite as his own sisters.
However, admirable as this power of creating compelling powerful characters is, Jane Austen's genius went quite a bit further. In her novels, she routinely describes habits of the mind that 200 years later would come to be catalogued and described in a branch of psychology called cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology, which happens to be my research area, is the study of mental process like language, memory, attention, problem solving and thinking. And I am not kidding when I say that Jane Austen was absolutely gifted with prescience when it comes to cognitive psychology. There are hundreds of examples in her work, but I will take you through handful of the most striking.
Emma
Emma is full of examples of Jane Austen's cognitive psych credentials, but the best example of it is in Emma's willful misunderstanding of Mr. Elton's intentions towards Harriet. Despite some fairly striking evidence to the contrary, Emma manages to interpret every behaviour of Mr. Elton's as admiration for Harriet. When it all finally comes to a head and Emma realises that she was wrong all along, she has this mental realisation:
"How she could have been so deceived!—He protested that he had never thought seriously of Harriet—never! She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made every thing bend to it." Emma, Volume 1, Chapter 16
Now read this description of Confirmation Bias:
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Emma is a walking talking embodiment of confirmation bias, which although credited to Wason (1960), should probably be credited to Austen (1815).
Now read this description of Confirmation Bias:
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Emma is a walking talking embodiment of confirmation bias, which although credited to Wason (1960), should probably be credited to Austen (1815).
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice is arguably Austen's most loved novel and the entire premise of a first impression colouring your judgment and blinding you to reality is in itself an example of confirmation bias. The whole story is an exploration of the way that human judgment can be biased. However, there is one very interesting example of foreknowledge of cognitive psychology in the novel that really strikes me and it is in an exchange between Elizabeth, Bingley and Darcy at Netherfield. They are talking about Bingley being easily influenced and whether or not one should yield to a friend's request.
"By all means," cried Bingley; "let us hear all the particulars, not forgetting their comparative height and size; for that will have more weight in the argument, Miss Bennet, than you may be aware of. I assure you that, if Darcy were not such a great tall fellow, in comparison with myself, I should not pay him half so much deference." Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 10
That sounds awfully like the Height Halo Effect, discovered by Edward Thorndike in the 20's. Taller people in general are seen to be more competent, authoritative and intelligent than shorter people. There is an oft cited statistic which claims that the taller candidate in presidential elections almost always win, and whilst the reality of this relationship is more complicated than this, there is a statistical relationship between height and number of popular votes a candidate received (Tall claims? Sense and nonsense about the importance of height of US presidents, The Leadership Quarterly (Impact Factor: 2.7). 02/2013; 24:159-171. DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.09.002).
So Bingley has somehow cottoned to the fact that most of us unconsciously defer to those who are taller. And I thought Bingers was a bit dim...
Mansfield Park
In Mansfield Park, Fanny has an irritating habit of rhapsodising about things when she is supposed to be having conversations with people. In one conversation with Mary Crawford, Fanny starts waxing lyrical about the shrubbery in the Parsonage House. Mary Crawford is quite rightly pretty bored with all of this nonsense.
However, in amongst this, Fanny comes out with a very astute observation on the nature of memory.
“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.” Mansfield Park, Chapter 22
What Fanny has realised is the same thing that memory psychologists are increasingly acknowledging. Memory is not like a video recording system that passively takes in events and transcribes them into the brain. The things we remember are hugely influenced by our own biases and reflect the subjective nature of our experiences. Memory is affected by lots of factors that we are not conscious of. For example, emotionally salient events are much easier to encode and retrieve that emotionally neutral events.
Memory is also hugely context dependent. For example. it is really easy to remember a phone number when you have your phone in front of you. Your fingers move as if possessed and it seems like the memory lives there instead of in your brain. But when someone asks you to say a given phone number and you are not looking at your phone, you flail about totally confused. Fanny's exact words, sometimes so serviceable, so obedient at others, so bewilders and so weak.
She may be one of the hardest Austen heroines to connect with, but she was on the money about memory. If only we could get her to stop talking about trees...
Pride and Prejudice is arguably Austen's most loved novel and the entire premise of a first impression colouring your judgment and blinding you to reality is in itself an example of confirmation bias. The whole story is an exploration of the way that human judgment can be biased. However, there is one very interesting example of foreknowledge of cognitive psychology in the novel that really strikes me and it is in an exchange between Elizabeth, Bingley and Darcy at Netherfield. They are talking about Bingley being easily influenced and whether or not one should yield to a friend's request.
"By all means," cried Bingley; "let us hear all the particulars, not forgetting their comparative height and size; for that will have more weight in the argument, Miss Bennet, than you may be aware of. I assure you that, if Darcy were not such a great tall fellow, in comparison with myself, I should not pay him half so much deference." Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 10
That sounds awfully like the Height Halo Effect, discovered by Edward Thorndike in the 20's. Taller people in general are seen to be more competent, authoritative and intelligent than shorter people. There is an oft cited statistic which claims that the taller candidate in presidential elections almost always win, and whilst the reality of this relationship is more complicated than this, there is a statistical relationship between height and number of popular votes a candidate received (Tall claims? Sense and nonsense about the importance of height of US presidents, The Leadership Quarterly (Impact Factor: 2.7). 02/2013; 24:159-171. DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.09.002).
So Bingley has somehow cottoned to the fact that most of us unconsciously defer to those who are taller. And I thought Bingers was a bit dim...
Mansfield Park
In Mansfield Park, Fanny has an irritating habit of rhapsodising about things when she is supposed to be having conversations with people. In one conversation with Mary Crawford, Fanny starts waxing lyrical about the shrubbery in the Parsonage House. Mary Crawford is quite rightly pretty bored with all of this nonsense.
Oh god! She's talking about evergreens again.
However, in amongst this, Fanny comes out with a very astute observation on the nature of memory.
“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.” Mansfield Park, Chapter 22
What Fanny has realised is the same thing that memory psychologists are increasingly acknowledging. Memory is not like a video recording system that passively takes in events and transcribes them into the brain. The things we remember are hugely influenced by our own biases and reflect the subjective nature of our experiences. Memory is affected by lots of factors that we are not conscious of. For example, emotionally salient events are much easier to encode and retrieve that emotionally neutral events.
Memory is also hugely context dependent. For example. it is really easy to remember a phone number when you have your phone in front of you. Your fingers move as if possessed and it seems like the memory lives there instead of in your brain. But when someone asks you to say a given phone number and you are not looking at your phone, you flail about totally confused. Fanny's exact words, sometimes so serviceable, so obedient at others, so bewilders and so weak.
She may be one of the hardest Austen heroines to connect with, but she was on the money about memory. If only we could get her to stop talking about trees...
So what do you think? Are there some good ones I have missed? Or does your favourite author show the same prescience? I'd love to hear about it.
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