Why You’re Smarter Than You Think

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us know what it feels like to be overlooked. The school we would love to study at doesn't love us back. We get passed over for a job or a promotion. When we ask to try our hand at something, we are told, "No."

Now, sometimes, rejection might be a true reflection of our abilities. We can't run fast enough to make the team or remember all the facts needed to get through medical school. There are other times, however, when rejection is not about our limitations, it's that other people see us as limited. Our concerns over how we are judged are often, most acute, most charged, when it comes to the topic of intelligence. Most of us don't just want to be smart; we want to be seen as smart.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I just remember being taunted and being told things like, "Oh, you're too stupid to go into fourth grade. You idiot," that sort of thing. But, yeah, it was really painful.

Shankar Vedantam:

This week on Hidden Brain, many of us have knee-jerk conclusions about what intelligence is and how it can be measured. We think we know what intelligence is. But do we really?

Scott Barry Kaufman:

It almost instantly seduced me into loving the science of IQ and intelligence. And I forgot that I was supposed to be on this vendetta. I forgot.

Shankar Vedantam:

In the first three years of his life, Scott Barry Kaufman suffered from a number of ear infections.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

It made it very hard for me to process auditory input in real time, and so I was a couple milliseconds behind everyone else. I would hear things, and then I would have to in my head cognitively process it. Like listen to it over again, while everyone else was already onto the next thing.

Shankar Vedantam:

The conclusion that many people drew? Scott wasn't very bright.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

It's very easy to look at someone and just judge them as dumb, because they're slower than someone else. And that sort of processing speed issue is one that I confronted, first and foremost, as a kid.

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott's teachers didn't know what to make of him. He was often very creative, but he didn't seem to be able to keep up with his peers. Things came to a head in the third grade.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

And I believe the official diagnosis was I was too immature to go on to fourth grade. And I remember thinking to myself, "My, gosh, I must be really immature if I'm too immature to go to fourth grade, that's really bad."

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott has seen the reports his teachers wrote about him when he was a kid. They say the problem was about more than academics.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

They say things like, "He's off to the side, often, socially isolated. He seems to be in his own world." I guess they viewed all that as some form of learning disability. That I sort of was off on my own planet over there.

Shankar Vedantam:

He quickly discovered that when you repeat a grade, the kids around you start to look at you differently.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

It really amplified this feeling I already had of that I was different. I remember, even from first to third grade, I felt like a huge outsider from the other kids, but then making me repeat third grade and then having all my friends go on, and they kept me there, it amplified it to a very, very large degree. I remember feeling really, really low self-esteem. And I remember just being very, very confused, because I didn't actually feel like there was anything wrong with me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott has a specific memory from that additional year he spent in third grade. A group of kids formed a circle around him in the bathroom.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

If you took me back to Penn Wynne Elementary School and you're like, "Show me the bathroom, show me the sink that your face was pushed into the sink, and the water was running," I could point you directly to it. And I just remember being taunted and being told things like, "Oh, you're too stupid to go into fourth grade. You idiot," that sort of thing. But, yeah, it was really painful

Shankar Vedantam:

When Scott was seven, and again at 11, school administrators made him take IQ tests so they could figure out next steps for him. One test stands out in his memory, like a scene from a movie.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I remember driving up this very windy road to get there, somehow seems fitting. This very, very long, long windy road. I remember the road. I remember I was with my mom, remember the building. So as I'm there and I'm taking this IQ testing session, I remember second guessing all my answers. I remember desperately wanting to show him I was smart and that report, his observations are things like, "Scott obviously wanted to do well, and he second guessed his choices a lot. My estimation is that he is very, very bright, but gets in his own way, because of his self-doubt."

All I knew from that meeting is that I was shipped off to a whole school for kids with learning disabilities. I was taken away from my public school, so that's all I knew. There was like, I know I took this test. I knew it was a terrifying experience, and then I knew I was shipped off, taken away from all my friends. So that was pretty traumatic.

Shankar Vedantam:

From the outside, it might seem like Scott was privileged. His family had the resources for him to go to a school that would meet his needs. But as a kid, Scott felt the adults in his life was sending him a clear message.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I am really different. Okay, we'll go even further, I'm a freak. I'm a freak. Something's really wrong with me.

Shankar Vedantam:

The outcome of Scott's IQ test was the opposite of what he had secretly hoped for. His dream was that he would do so well that the psychologist would recommend he move to a prestigious school near his Philadelphia home. It was called the Haverford School. Now, each day on his way to his new school, he'd pass Haverford. To Scott, his dream school might as well have been on Mars. By the sixth grade, Scott was back in public school, but still on the special ed track. That was the year he discovered that along with kids like him who had special needs, there was another category of kids who were really special.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I have a vivid memory of walking to my special ed classroom and hearing the announcement on the speaker, "Gifted kids report to room three for your gifted classes." And I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, here I am reporting to my special ed class. Who are these people?" That was one of my first introductions to the term gifted, by the way, was through the speaker in my middle school. And it was a vivid moment for me. It really was a vivid moment, because I was like, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. There's a whole different class of humans, that's the direct opposite of what I am? And they're the gifted ones." And suddenly it was like, I'm stuck in the complete opposite world.

Shankar Vedantam:

It felt awful.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

One way it felt awful was that the expectation carried me around from class to class to class, even some of the more mainstream classes I was starting to be put into in middle school. I remember being in a mainstream class, and on the first day of class, I saw this girl who I had such a crush on. Oh, my gosh, I was way too shy to ever say anything to her, but I saw her all around. And she was at the front of the classroom, and I was walking in, and I think I sat at the back and the teacher opened up the class and said, "Is Scott Kaufman here?"

And I was like, "Oh, my gosh." I'm looking down. "Is Scott Kaufman here. Oh, you're Scott Kaufman, can you please come up to the front of the class? Your mom says that you have trouble hearing things, and that it'll really help you hear my directions in the classroom." She sat me right next to this girl that I had a crush on. And I mean, that was mortifying. Everyone listening to this episode right now, think back to your 12-year-old self and that happening to you. I mean, I was so mortified.

Shankar Vedantam:

There were more psychological tests as time passed. Scott found himself simultaneously angry with psychologists and fascinated by them. On one occasion, his mother took him to see a therapist.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I remember him asking me, what do I want to be someday? What are my dreams? And I remember seeing the tag name, Dr. Milnick, I believe was his name, psychologist. And I remember it just like snapped in my head. I remember telling him like, "I want to be a psychologist. I want to be a psychologist someday." And I still have the reports, I have them all saved from like 1989 or something like that, where it said, "When he grows up, he wants to be an academic, PhD psychologist." But here's a big kicker to this: my mom tells me that they told her that, "Your son wants to be an academic, PhD psychologist, he wrote that on his thing, but we think he has delusions of grandeur."

Shankar Vedantam:

In Scott's young mind, psychologists had all this power. They were able to peer into your head and see things no one else could see. When they said stuff, people listened to them. The things they wrote down in their charts changed your life. They determined which school you went to, and which school you didn't go to. Scott felt psychology had shaped his life for the worse. If he could become a psychologist himself, he was sure he could do better. Sometimes he'd imagined himself giving talks about psychology to rapt audiences.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I remember taking a shower and just closing my eyes, and giving a 50-minute speech on human potential. The thing that excited me were ideas about how people are capable of so much more than they realize. How we don't really see the fullness of a human being. And this is even before TED Talks, but I remember, in my head, the recollection of it, is that the kind of talk I was giving matches exactly what a modern day TED Talk looks like.

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott tried to become his own psychologist. If he couldn't convince psychologists that he had potential, he decided he would prove his case to himself.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I became obsessed with IQ tests around that point. I remember just taking one IQ test after another. Some of them, I didn't do too well on. And then some of them I did really, really well on. And I was like, "Okay, I'm going to throw away those ones that weren't so good. I'm going to keep the other ones." I remember one IQ test result I took on the internet, which said I was profoundly gifted. And I took it, and I printed it out and I put it on my bedroom wall. I put this IQ test result on my bedroom wall. I remember the specific corner of the wall that I put it on, displaying my IQ test results I took from the internet. I think I was desperate to prove to anyone, like, just to show anyone like, "Look, there's some intelligence over here."

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott had one other pivotal interaction with the world of psychology and IQ tests. When he was in high school, he requested access to some of the classes his friends on the gifted track were taking. He was told to go see his school psychologist to get permission.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Yeah. I remember the office, it was a tiny room with file cabinets and a desk. There was like a little small desk that he sat in, and then I sat right next to him. And he had my files of like my files. My worst nightmare, by the way, I was like, "I really hope he doesn't look at my files, and he just looks at the who I am now."

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott was now 17 years old. The file on the psychologist's desk was a report with Scott's IQ test.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

And he's like, "So look, here's the deal," and he draws on it, it was either a napkin or a piece of paper, he drew a bell curve. And a bell curve for anyone that doesn't know what a bell curve is, you can place your someone's IQ score on this kind of bell curve that shows what proportion in the population, what percentage you are, where you are, where you stand, where do you stand, on IQ compared to everyone else in the general population or in your particular demographic. And he started in the far right. And he had like the label gifted there. He's like, "This is the far right of the bell curve, about 130." And he starts moving to the left. I'm like, "Oh, my God."

He moves them to the left. He moves it to like 110. And he's like, "Well, this is about where average is, about the 100 mark." And he still keeps moving to the left. And I feel like I'm getting agita over here. I'm like, "When's he going to stop? When's that pen going to stop? What are we getting at here?" He stops to a score, which I believe was my score when I was tested at age eight or nine. It wasn't even the one that I was tested at 11. And he's like, "This is your score." He's like, "You're not gifted. Unfortunately you can't qualify for gifted education. But I'm here if you want to talk about anything else, school psychology related."

Shankar Vedantam:

What was your score, Scott?

Scott Barry Kaufman:

89, something like that. 87, something like that. I mean, I'm almost embarrassed, because it's just like, it's a pretty low score. Not that anyone should be embarrassed who has that score, but I am so resistant to having people judge me through the lens of that. That's why I don't even really tell the story anymore. I feel like I'm even taking a risk even giving a number. I'm not that person anymore.

Shankar Vedantam:

When this happened, Scott, do you recall him saying where you sat on the IQ spectrum? I mean, if 130 was gifted and 90 to 110 was normal, did he describe what 87 was?

Scott Barry Kaufman:

He didn't really describe it to me, no. There wasn't a real explanation. It was really like, "You're not gifted, so my hands are tied." Like, "What can I do?"

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand that after you left his office, you went to the school library and you basically looked up how to read IQ tests. What did you find?

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I remember seeing a textbook on human intelligence and they have a chart in there that shows what different IQ bands people are capable of achieving. And I remember seeing my range that he kind of just showed me, and it said, "Unlikely to graduate high school." And I always had this rebellious bone in my body though, because I remember saying, "(beep) that," and throwing the book across the library.

Shankar Vedantam:

By this point, Scott was actually doing well in school. He had a case to be moved to the gifted track. But in looking at the results of his IQ test from when he was in elementary school, the school psychologist was saying some important things. First, the test had picked up something innate about Scott. It didn't matter how much he'd learned or what he'd accomplished in the years afterward. The test had peered into his mind, and the test had determined he was not gifted. Not then, not now, not ever. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Scott Barry Kaufman desperately wanted to be seen as a smart kid, but everyone kept telling him he was the opposite of smart. He ended up repeating third grade, was sent to a school for kids with learning differences, and scored poorly on IQ tests. Scott didn't just experience these things as setbacks. He found them confusing. He thought of himself as a smart kid with lots of potential. Why didn't the world see him that way? At one point, though, when Scott was in high school, a new teacher noticed that he looked bored in the special ed resource room.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

And she was looking at me for most of that class, and I was wondering why she kept looking at me. But she took me aside after class, and she said, "Look, I just had to ask, what are you doing here? I see you." And oh, boy, it really was like a profound moment in my life, because I remember thinking in my head, "What am I doing here?" Repeating her question. And then, and then, "Yeah, what am I doing here?" It was like, just the empowerment I needed.

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott felt like he had been trying for years to tell people he had potential. Suddenly, there was someone else who could see the same thing.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I felt like people thought I was crazy for thinking that I had some potential. In this moment, I was like, "Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing here. That's what I've been trying to tell people."

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott was allowed to leave special ed on a trial basis. The effect of someone believing in him was transformative.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I actually went from like a C, D student to like a straight A student almost overnight. And I took summer school classes. I joined so many things like plays, I did musicals and everything. Something just erupted in me at that point, where all this stuff just bubbled forth. And I was like, "I love learning. I love everything about this. And thank you for giving me that opportunity, finally, school system that never gave me the opportunity before."

Shankar Vedantam:

And it's almost like this one teacher, in this one moment, it was almost like a light bulb going off in your head, it sounds like.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

It wasn't like a light bulb, it was like a volcano erupting, a volcano of human potential that had been dormant.

Shankar Vedantam:

One day, he was hanging out with friends after school.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

And they said, "Hey, we have to just go to the choir room and pick up something." This was after school. And so I just went with them, and they were in the choir room and the choir conductor was there. And I remember just sort of like making fun of them. I was like, "You know you all sound like this, (singing)." And the choir conductor turned around, looked at me and said, "What just happened? You have talent. Do you want to join our choir?" And so that was one of my first big things that gave me such an amazing sense of efficacy and excitement. And it just felt so good.

I mean, I can't tell you how good it feels to go from a long period in your life where you are invisible, you are literally invisible, and you know deep inside you that you're capable of more, to a moment where suddenly you're now allowed to be discovered. It was almost like I went through nine grades where I was forbidden for anyone even to see that I had any potential.

Shankar Vedantam:

You graduate high school and you still want to become a psychologist. You decide that you want to go to Carnegie Mellon to college in your home state. It has a strong program in cognitive psychology, so you take the SAT. What happens?

Scott Barry Kaufman:

So I didn't do too hot on the SAT. I'm going to just lay it to you straight there, my friend. Huge anxiety. I'm getting anxiety thinking about that SAT session, even just thinking about it. How many... 20, oh, 25 years later, I'm having anxiety. I remember seeing the countdown of the clock on the screen, "Tick, tick, you got two minutes left to answer all these questions," and my brain just freezing. And I didn't do too hot on the SAT.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering, at the point in which you got your SAT scores back, it seems almost as if this is déjà vu. You've taken another test and the test is supposed to purportedly tell you something about your potential, and how smart you are, which track you can go to which college you can get into. And very much like what happened when you were eight, and what happened when you were 11, you were having a test that basically told you, "Scott Barry Kaufman, you are not destined for this track. You are destined for some other track."

Scott Barry Kaufman:

This is very astute of you to notice that, but that's exactly how I felt as well. I was like, again, you can't escape it.

Shankar Vedantam:

To compensate for his week score, but also to settle scores with standardized testing, Scott came up with a plan. He decided to apply to the psychology program at Carnegie Mellon University, and to focus his application essay on his pet peeve with standardized tests. He argued that these tests did not reveal the true potential of students.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

And I wrote a very, very from the heart personal essay, which I still have saved, saying, "Our notions of human potential are really inaccurate. We need broader notions that go beyond standardized metrics to understand the real achievement potential of humans." And I wrote that from my heart. And I got rejected from the cognitive science program at Carnegie Mellon, presumably, in large part, to my lower SAT scores.

Shankar Vedantam:

But Scott didn't give up. He came up with a new idea. What if he applied to another department at the same school? Scott's voice teacher in high school thought he could become a professional opera singer. Could he get into Carnegie Mellon via the opera program?

Scott Barry Kaufman:

And I was like, "You know what? Let me sing Stars to them in in the opera program at Carnegie Mellon, maybe I can get in that way."

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott's favorite song in high school was Stars from Les Miserables. He sang it all the time, including at a performance in his senior year, a few months before his audition.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

(Singing) I went to the audition, and I sang my heart out. (Singing) Everything in that moment of like frustration, anger, I put it into that song.

(singing)

And they told my parents that they thought that I could be a real good opera singer, and they accepted me on a partial scholarship to Carnegie Mellon. When the other department at the university, they rejected me. So I didn't bother to tell the music department, "Just so you know, I've already been rejected in another part of your school." I didn't do that.

(singing)

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott mentally prepared himself for the path of an opera student. But then, his second semester, he signed up for an intro to psychology course.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

It reaffirmed how much I love psychology. You know when you meet something, you're like, "This is me," and then you go away from it and you come back to it, and it's still, "This is me"? That's telling you something. That's important information. And I was like, "I got to do this."

Shankar Vedantam:

He quietly transferred into the psychology department. Soon, he was learning about intelligence and the science of IQ tests. His goal from the very start was to tear down the edifice of IQ testing, but he felt he had to go into the lion's den first in order to tear it down. By the time he was 20, Scott had talked his way into a spot at Cambridge University in England, working with one of the most prominent researchers on the science of intelligence.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I was so nervous and excited. I didn't know if I was going to be able to be as intelligent as I needed to be, to be a research assistant at Cambridge University. It was almost hard for me to fathom that I would legitimately be intelligent enough to be worthy of the situation. I was like, "Scott, even with all your grandiose fantasies and everything, this is a little... Are you serious? What are you doing, Scott? What are you doing?"

Shankar Vedantam:

But Scott's mentor, Nick Mackintosh, set him at ease.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Nick couldn't have been more wonderful, more supportive, and he must have seen something in me. He saw the person that I was in that moment.

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott didn't tell Nick about his own experience with IQ tests. He was still ashamed.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I mean, he didn't know my background. By the way, I kept all this a secret from him throughout all the times we worked together, and everything. He didn't look at my IQ score when I was age 11. And he accepted me to work with him. And I did some pretty rigorous research with him in that six months as an undergrad, that would then form the basis of my master's thesis with him.

Shankar Vedantam:

Studying under Nick, Scott started to learn about the deep history of IQ tests, starting with Alfred Binet, a French psychologist. In 1904, Alfred Binet was charged by the French government with devising a test. The idea was to direct resources to kids who needed help in school. Alfred Binet made it very clear what he thought the test could and could not measure.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

He wrote that. He said, "This is not a intelligence test that I'm creating. This is a test that I've been given the task of differentiating those who would need more remediation, and those who don't. We say only about the child's current needs, not his future potential." He said this. Binet said this in the manual, in the testing, the Binet manual, the original manual. He says things like that. "We do not even begin to purport what this person is capable of." The great tragedy of that story is that they ended up never using his tests in France.

Shankar Vedantam:

Instead, it was the Americans who fell in love with Alfred Binet's test, and they used it to measure the very thing the French psychologist had warned against. They used it to assess intelligence.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

It completely betrayed the spirit, the philosophy, the principles upon which Binet originally wanted to create the test, completely betrayed him. And on his deathbed, he wrote an essay saying, "The Americans have betrayed me."

Shankar Vedantam:

The psychologist Lewis Terman at Stanford was among those who transformed Binet's test in the United States. Instead of being used as a tool to direct resources to kids who needed help, he turned the test into a tracking tool to identify the gifted.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Terman was very, very interested in giftedness and really had this idea in his head that genius is only recruited from the line of high IQ. There's a lot of people involved in the early days of applying IQ tests. It is really the application part here, we're talking about using it to sort people in America that betrayed the original philosophy. They made it into multiple choice tests and gave it out to entire school systems, gave it out in the Army. They used it in lots of ways to send back people coming in from Ellis island. Like, "Oh, you're too feeble minded to come to America." Nevermind that a lot of these tests had verbal components to it, and you're giving it to people who English is not their first language. It's mind-boggling the extents to which this test, which did have some potential for real utility, how much it was abused in the earliest days of use of those tests.

Shankar Vedantam:

Lewis Terman drew on the work of German psychologist, William stern, and helped popularize the notion of something called an intelligence quotient, what we now know today as IQ.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Mathematically, there's a formula that a lot of people started using in America, which I think is indicative of the way they thought about intelligence. In order to understand the formula, you have to understand the difference between mental age and chronological age. But they're basically saying you could be 13, that's your chronological age in terms of your biology. Your mental age, can be below that or above it. So your mental age, you could be a 13-year-old with a mental age of seven, and they called you backwards. That was the term they used. You're backwards, if that's the case. But you're gifted if your mental age far exceeds your chronological age.

Shankar Vedantam:

So Mackintosh obviously was one of the most respected researchers in the field of intelligence, but he was also genuinely open-minded and responsive and curious and not sort of dogmatic. Can you just describe that? You, in some ways, were coming to him perhaps with an agenda that he didn't know. That your agenda was really to pull down the edifice of intelligence and intelligence testing, and maybe he didn't know that you were a saboteur, who had just arrived at Cambridge University. But describe to me the way he worked and sort of the effect this had on you and the way you started thinking about the questions you were grappling with.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Mackintosh was a traditional British psychometrician. I mean, that's as traditional IQ as you get on paper and pencil. But his personality and his demeanor and everything about him just signaled a pure, pure love of science, no agenda. No agenda on Nick Mackintosh's part. He wrote a textbook, The Science of IQ, which I remember reading, and it almost instantly made me a, I won't say convert, I don't know if that word quite applies, but it almost instantly seduced me into loving the science of IQ and intelligence. And I forgot that I was supposed to be on this vendetta. I forgot.

Shankar Vedantam:

At one point, Nick Mackintosh asked a simple question: "Assume for a moment that there is no underlying innate ability called intelligence. Some people are good at math, others are good at reading. But if that was the case," he asked, "why is it teachers often notice that the same students who do well at math, also do well at reading?"

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I mean, if you read this book, The Science of IQ, by Mackintosh, it's just so interesting to see all the little nuances of the field. Things I just didn't dawn on me could be true. I had all these like ideologies and thoughts that, "Well, there's no such thing as general intelligence," or, "That IQ doesn't matter in life." And then here I am reading in this textbook, "Generally, didn't have to be this way, but it's very curious that someone's score on a non-verbal IQ test could correlate so highly with someone's score on a verbal." And then he would ask questions, like, "What is it about vocabulary that could be in common, in terms of cognitive processes, then rotating an image in the mind?"

Shankar Vedantam:

What does vocabulary have in common with cognitive processes like rotating an image in the mind? If verbal skills and spatial skills were just that, skills that could be learned with practice, wasn't it odd that the kids who were good at one were often also good at the other? Scott found himself intrigued by questions like this.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

My curiosity just took over, and I started actually doing really traditional, serious experimental research with him, when I got there to Cambridge.

Shankar Vedantam:

There was a second area where Nick Mackintosh started to sway Scott's preexisting views about IQ tests.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Something that I found fascinating, when I started to go to Nick Mackintosh's lectures, he did present data showing the correlation between IQ and lots of outcomes in life. And that was a time I did feel a little triggered based on my childhood. And I found it very, very interesting and almost a moral quandary. He presented like basically the same table I saw when I was 16, and said, "(beep) that" in the library. He presented that in his lecture at University of Cambridge, showing the different IQ bands and what they tend to do in their life. Like, "Oh, my gosh, really? This chart again?" I kind of like snapped back to my childhood. And I was like, "Well, what do I do? Because this is the science, this is the data."

Shankar Vedantam:

Scott's foray into the lion's den of IQ testing hadn't turned out the way he'd expected. When we come back, how Scott responded to his moral quandary. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Early in his career, intelligence researcher, Scott Barry Kaufman set out to tear down the edifice of IQ testing. He felt it had greatly limited his own prospects as a young person. But then he found himself convinced by much of the science behind IQ. It left him with a quandary. Should he trust his own experience with IQ tests? Or should he trust the data?

As he finished his undergraduate studies and went on to get a PhD in cognitive psychology, Scott came to feel that the real question was not whether the science of IQ was wrong, but whether it was incomplete. One thing that IQ tests had not looked at was how much a person cared about what they were doing.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

When you go take an IQ test, it tends to be divorced entirely from the context of your own life. That's by design. They want to see how good are you at abstract reasoning. And that's thought to be the height of intelligence. However, so much of life is not decontextualized from our life, in fact, most of our life. When we're excited about certain things, our attentional system is directed towards it. This engagement aspect is absolutely essential to our understanding of someone's potential. The more we engage in something we learn, and the more that we learn something, the more it makes us want to engage in something. Because once we start becoming good at something, then we start to invest more of our time and energy into it. So it's a very strong dynamic cycle.

Shankar Vedantam:

Teachers, managers, and coaches can testify to Scott's insight. Talent matters, but sometimes passion and drive matter more. Along with deep engagement, creativity is another driver of performance that is overlooked by IQ tests. In fact, researchers have found that there can be an inverse relationship between intelligence and creativity.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

When you look at the neuroscience of creativity, those who have the most imaginative sort of ideas are the kind of brains that show reduction of gray volume in what's called the prefrontal cortex. So sometimes you actually find that some of the brains that look the least intelligent are actually the most creative. That's the point I'm trying to make here.

So it depends a lot on your ability to sometimes put aside all the prior expertise you have, maybe even put aside your critical thinking facilities and be able to really have more associative processes. I like to say, it's really important to be really open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out. So that's why I think intelligence is important. I'm not saying intelligence isn't important, but it depends on the thing that you're creating. I've actually published a paper showing the distinction between the arts and the sciences, and its prediction of IQ, and the extent to which IQ predicts these things. And you find IQ had a zero correlation with artistic, creative achievement in life.

Shankar Vedantam:

And why do you think it is that in artistic fields you're not seeing a connection between IQ and outcomes? What do you think is happening there, if you're a painter or a poet or a musician?

Scott Barry Kaufman:

One important cognitive process that's associated with arts is what's called latent inhibition, and it's particularly reduced latent inhibition. So usually, we tend to see the world and tag things as relevant or irrelevant to a problem we're working on based on our prior expectations. But people in the arts are really good at constantly seeing things with fresh eyes. They're constantly good at putting aside their prior preconceptions and trying to find meaning in the here and now. And I've published papers, and there are other papers showing that people who tend to have a reduced latent inhibition, reduced, tend to score higher in the arts, creative achievement domain.

Also, it's correlated with openness to experience as well. The personality trait, openness to experience. Openness to aesthetics, openness to beauty, and also emotions, being able to tap into the rich, rich tapestry of your emotions and not view some of your emotions as off limits. Like saying, "You always have to be happy all the time," but actually saying, "I'm actually going to take this depression I'm going through and use that as fodder for creativity."

Shankar Vedantam:

You've also said that IQ tests fail to capture the full range of human potential, in that they focus on the explicit, the conscious, the controlled forms of thinking. What does this leave out, Scott?

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Absolutely. Well, one specific thing I did study in my dissertation is this idea called implicit learning, which is our ability to learn the probabilistic rule structure of the world automatically and implicitly without a level of awareness. This is deep implications. I mean, so you talk about the theme of your show, right here, we're getting to... this is very, very congruent. I mean, think about what is required to develop social intelligence. Sometimes when people smile, they mean this, sometimes they don't. Sometimes when people's eyes are like this, sometimes they don't. The world is messy.

And from a cognitive scientist lens, I develop tasks to measure differences in people's ability to learn about the probabilistic structure of something. And we have found that's virtually uncorrelated, wholly uncorrelated with IQ. The people that can go into an IQ testing, one of our sessions, and be like A, C, B, D, and get like extraordinarily off the charts IQ, oftentimes, are the ones that are not learning implicitly.

Shankar Vedantam:

Solving puzzles involves logic and analysis, but logic cannot help you read someone's expression in a crowded room. That requires cognitive skills that are often learned unconsciously. Scott is not merely saying that the cognitive ability that IQ tests measure is different than the abilities that allow us to apprehend unwritten patterns and relationships in the real world. He's saying that sometimes these different cognitive abilities might come at the expense of each other.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

It's like a seesaw, sometimes the thing on one side causing you challenges brings you up in another way.

Shankar Vedantam:

He sees this especially among so-called 2e kids.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

2e stands for twice exceptional, where you have a profound, extraordinary difficulty or challenge in your life, and you also have a profound gift or talent or ability. But there are people that really do have profound difficulties and profound gifts and talents in one body.

Shankar Vedantam:

And in some ways it complicates the notion of sort of how we think about people. We think about smart people as always being smart, dull people always being dull. And what you're doing, partly, with sort of this 2e label, is basically saying, "No, people are more complicated than that."

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Absolutely. I saw that just going all the way back to the sixth grade Scott, who heard the announcement on the speaker, "Gifted kids go to their room." I sensed in my gut, there's something much more complicated about humans than the way that we're dividing and sorting people here. And I still believe it. And I believe it in so many ways, like hidden ways, that we don't explicitly acknowledge in our society. Old systems, especially in an education system, but you also see it in organizations and hiring practices. It goes deep, this stuff, a lot of these assumptions we have about human potential that are really outdated and just wrong.

Shankar Vedantam:

So the story that has stuck with me, I think, through this whole episode is the one that you told me about the school psychologist who looked at your IQ test and showed you where you fell on the bell curve of intelligence. And started with the gifted and moved the pencil over and over and over to the left and then to the left, and then more to the left. That moment was really crushing for you in all kinds of ways. But some years ago you had an extraordinary experience. You were walking in a park in Philadelphia and you came by an elderly man sitting on a park bench. Set the scene for me and tell me that story, Scott.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

I was really happy. I was pumped. I just had a nice weightlifting session, and I'm running. And I cross a man on a bench and I feel something in my gut, like dread. I'm like, "Why am I feeling dread? I don't know this person." I looked back at the person, and then it hits me, that's the school psychologist from high school who drew the bell curve on the napkin and basically inspired me to go into this field, not in the way that he would've ever thought. But I'm like, "That's him. He's older, but I recognize him."

And it did create a bit of a dilemma in me, which is like, "Do I approach him? Do I say hi? Do I sock him in the face? What do I do?" And with a lot of trepidation and my heart beating very fast, I approached him on the park bench. And I said, "Hey, do you mind if I just sit next to you for a second, and I want to tell you something." And he is like, "Sure, no problem. No problem."

And I sat down, I said, "Hey, I was a student of yours and you changed my life." And he said, "Oh, yeah, in a sort of screw you sort of way, probably." He said that, and I laughed. And I said, "Well, you just, you did. I'm a psychologist now." And I didn't feel the need to yell at him or tell him the whole story. But he said something very interesting to me when I told him I'm a psychologist now. He was like, "Well, that's interesting. I'm actually tutoring a kid right now who really low IQ, really low IQ, is really not the sharpest tool in the shed." Well, my blood boiled a bit, and I calmed myself down and I just said, "Maybe you could just keep looking deeper beyond the IQ, into maybe think about him in a bit of a broader way, where you look at the totality of him, not a particular slice of him when you're making that kind of judgment call." And he agreed. I mean, he agreed. To his credit, he's like, "That's a good point."

And I just kind of realized in that moment, like, you know what? He's not evil, he's human. He was probably doing the best that he could at the time, in what he knew and how he was trained. And even now he was doing the best he can to try to help this kid. And the best I could do is not yell at him or tell him my story, but to just tell him about the field of twice exceptional and to tell him about, "Well, maybe here's some resources." So I offered him some resources to help this kid based on the research I've done.

I wish someone told him that when I was in 11th grade, maybe he would've treated me differently. But then again, if he treated me differently, maybe I wouldn't have been in the position to ever even be at that park bench to tell him that. So it's all very weird. I don't know, life sometimes you just got to go with it.

Shankar Vedantam:

Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman studies the science of human potential. He's the author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, and Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. Scott, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Scott Barry Kaufman:

Thank you. This was wonderful.

Our unsung heroes today are Jay and Jessica Sherer. Jay is a novelist and runs a non-profit production company called the Reclamation Society. Jessica is an editor of non-fiction and fiction books. We recently had some questions about the publishing industry, and Jay and Jessica graciously made time to chat and share their insights. Thank you, Jay and Jessica.

If you enjoy Hidden Brain and have found the ideas we explore to be useful in your own life, please consider supporting our work. You can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Every generation has its power couples. The novelist Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Talkless were arguably one such couple. In the early part of the 20th century, their Paris apartment was the center of a thriving literary and artistic scene, attracting the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso. But that doesn't mean everything was perfect between them. Their relationship hit a rough patch when Alice learned that Gertrude had had a love affair before she met Alice. The writer Francesca Wade describes this revelation in her book, Gertrude Stein, An Afterlife. She writes, Talkless saw the discovery of this past entanglement as a betrayal of their shared and fundamental understanding that there would be no secrets between them. In response, Alice later told an interviewer, she tormented Gertrude for a year and a half. She destroyed all of the letters Gertrude's former lover had sent to her. And on a trip to the US, she tried to keep Gertrude's American friends from seeing her. Eventually, Gertrude Stein had to tell her partner that if she didn't stop, their relationship was over. Alice's choice, either make peace with her partner's past or split up. She didn't have to like that Gertrude had loved someone else, but she had to accept it. Accepting our partners isn't always easy, as Alice B. Talkless discovered. For many of us, the impulse to alter things we dislike about our partners is irresistible. But as the psychologist James Cordova discussed with us in a series of recent Hidden Brain episodes, acceptance is essential to unlocking deeper, more meaningful connections. If you missed those episodes, you can find them in this podcast feed. They're titled Love 2.0, How to Fix Your Marriage, Part 1, and Love 2.0, How to Fix Your Marriage, Part 2. Today, James Cordova returns to Hidden Brain to respond to listeners' thoughts, stories, and questions about their relationships. It's the latest installment of our popular segment, Your Questions Answered. James Cordova, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

James Cordova: Thank you so much, Shankar. It's great to be here.

Shankar Vedantam: James, one of the things we discussed in our earlier conversations was the fact that some problems in our relationships are fixable and some are not. So deciding which side of the bed to sleep on, that might be an easy problem. Deciding whether to live in the city or the suburbs where partners want different things, you call these mezzanine level problems. Then there are the set of problems you call perpetual issues. What makes perpetual issues different from other problems, James?

James Cordova: That's a good question. The characteristic that makes perpetual issues different is that they are rising out of naturally occurring fundamental differences between two partners. So these are things like personality differences, say for example, introvert and extrovert, different emotional relationships with money, like a spender relationship with money versus a saver relationship with money. So they're part of how we're built. And because it's sort of fundamental to who we are, that agenda to try to change each other tends to create tension.

Shankar Vedantam: In other words, what you're saying is, perpetual issues get at things that people really cannot change or accommodate.

James Cordova: Exactly. Right. And they tend to be the things that are left when we've changed everything that we can.

Shankar Vedantam: You say that acceptance is the solution to perpetual issues. Talk about this idea. What do you mean by acceptance here, James?

James Cordova: So acceptance is letting go of our efforts to change the other person and our efforts to change ourselves in relation to those things that even though we wish they were otherwise, hard experience has sort of taught us, oh, this actually isn't going to change. We gave it the good old college try and it has shown itself as resilient to that.

Shankar Vedantam: I think some people hear the term acceptance and think that means that you are suggesting capitulation or rolling over. You talk about the importance of developing a soft front and a strong back when we are engaging with our partners. What do you mean by that term?

James Cordova: So soft front strong back is a way of moving in relation to each other, where the soft front is really, it's just empathy for our partner. I know where you're coming from, I get it, I can feel it and I care. That's the soft front and the strong back is really empathy for ourselves, compassion for ourselves, connection to our own well-being and not abandoning that in relation to what is best for our partner. So how can we meet our partner with empathy without abandoning the things that are best for ourselves?

Shankar Vedantam: We talked in our earlier conversations about people who are cactuses and people who are ferns. If you are a fern, you crave a lot of water, so you want a lot of emotional connection. If you are a cactus, you crave less water and need more time to yourself to maybe charge your own batteries. Here is a message we received on that front from a listener named Emily. She says that she and her husband have been married for 12 years and were together for many years before that.

Emily: In many ways, we are super compatible, but we are realizing our emotional compatibility is off. I desire to share all of my feelings and dump them all out on him, because keeping in my feelings makes me anxious and upset. Whereas he desires to not have that emotional overload and becomes very overwhelmed by it easily. So we're struggling with how do we get our emotional needs met with emotions that don't align. We have chosen to stay together and are seeking support through a therapist, and we will continue to choose to stay together, because there is a lot of love and a lot of history.

Shankar Vedantam: I can hear how Emily is struggling here, James. Obviously, you don't know all the particulars of this relationship, but what advice would you have for Emily and her husband?

James Cordova: It's such a, in some ways, classic conflict of friction between partners, and in some ways, it is that cactus fern kind of pattern. What Emily is pointing at is for her, going back over the contents of the day, sharing the hard things. Like she doesn't want to be alone in her own head and in her own heart with that. So it really is a bid for connection and to just have some companionship, to invite a friend into that space with her. And that's not at all an uncommon way to seek connection with others. For her husband, and this is often gendered in this way, like when I'm done at the end of my day with all the hard things that have gone on and I've found a place to sort of put all of my discomfort internally, going over it again is like re-exposing ourselves to it. It's like I already put that bit of toxicity away and it can feel like, oh, now you're inviting me to relive it, right? And so, you know, it's a way that we sort of learn as men sometimes to avoid feeling that discomfort, you know, a second time. And I think what we can miss is we don't give ourselves the opportunity to have the experience of actually feeling the connection that can emerge from that. And so, you know, I guess the advice that I would give is for each of them in that cactus fern way to recognize what the other person needs to feel like, I care about the way that you experience this, right? So for Emily to be able to understand that it's just always going to be a little bit harder for her husband to step back into, you know, talking about things that are experienced as emotionally hard. He can do it. But to care that it's a little bit more challenging and to just express appreciation that, you know, I know I'm asking you to do something that doesn't come naturally to you. And for her husband to know and to care, like, this is one of the most fundamental ways that I can love you. This is one of the most fundamental ways that I can make sure that you're getting the love and care, the water that sustains you. And if I refuse to do that, even if you want to be close and connected to me, your roots are just gonna dry out, right? Like, it's not choiceful. It's very much is like taking care of a plant. If I don't water it enough, it is gonna die.

Shankar Vedantam: One of the things that often happens in relationships is that partners express their needs through accusations. You talk about the importance of emphasizing pain without bringing up accusations. How would you suggest a couple like Emily and her husband do this, James?

James Cordova: You know, for me, the key is to lead with empathy and compassionate understanding for where the other person is coming from. You know, the accusation is often, it's driven by our very good hearted desire to find a cause for the suffering that we're both experiencing. And psychologically, our first instinct is, well, you're sitting in front of me. You must be the cause and it must be inside of you, right? So it's just good problem solving. But that reach for the accusation actually never gets us anywhere. I mean, if you just think about your own experience, it actually never gets us anywhere that we're happy to be. The key is to reach first for compassionate understanding, right? Like, so let me understand what this is like for you from your perspective. And that, if I can do that, will soften my heart and sort of open my ears and open your ears a little bit better to understanding where I'm coming from so that we can see how the way that we're both entering this, that we are co-creating this point of friction or this point of pain between the two of us. And then we can actually collaborate to find a way forward.

Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain listeners are just amazing, James. And this next question blew me away. Listener Cassandra asks whether the challenge of acceptance has less to do with our partners and more to do with ourselves.

Cassandra: So one of the ways in which I've come to accept the things that I wish would change in my partner was to look to myself about why it bothers me. What is it about that thing? And work on what that is. Does it remind me of someone of my childhood? In my case, it did. It reminded me of my father. I'm a sober person. And every time my partner liked to enjoy a couple of drinks, I'd be upset with him because he would remind me of my father. And my intolerance for that was a hint that there's more to explore within myself.

Shankar Vedantam: What do you think, James? Is the challenge of acceptance less about accepting our partners and more about accepting ourselves?

James Cordova: I love that question. And I love what Cassandra is talking about, because she really is spot on. The arising of that experience of how I really don't like this. And the initial spot, the domain of acceptance is, what is showing up for me? What is arising in my own system, my own experience of discomfort and upset? I can tell that a button is getting pushed for me. And that almost always, if we're honest with ourselves, helps us to see the vulnerability that is being brushed up against by the thing that our partner is doing or failing to do. And so I love Cassandra's sort of example of, this is more about what I learned, what I've sort of experienced from my own father's drinking. And that's where my vulnerability is. And then there's two things. One is to be able to hold our own vulnerability with just great care and understanding and kindness, not get into a fight with our own vulnerability. And then we're also in a much better place to be able to share what's true for us with our partner in that non-blaming way that we were talking about, right? Like this isn't about something that you're doing that's bad or evil. This is about a vulnerability that I have, that I'm asking you to be aware of and to help me take care of.

Shankar Vedantam: Accepting our partner's flaws and making peace with them can be tough. Accepting our own flaws and apologizing for the hurt we've caused can be equally challenging. When we come back, listeners questions about the concept of eating the blame. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. I'm a good person doing the best I can in difficult circumstances. If that's something you've thought or said to yourself before, welcome to the club. Most of us think of ourselves as good people. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as our moral self-concept, and it's a process that can be important to our self-esteem and mental health. But it's also one of the reasons it can be really hard to say, I'm sorry. After all, we're good people, and we have intimate knowledge of our own thoughts and emotions. We know what we meant to say, even if the other person heard it differently. And yet, as difficult as it can be to apologize, doing so can break a cycle of bitterness and blame in dramatic relationships. Psychologist James Cordova refers to this as eating the blame. And many of our listeners had follow up thoughts and questions about this idea. James, remind us briefly what you mean by eating the blame.

James Cordova: So yeah, eating the blame is a phrase that I've borrowed from the Zen tradition. And the basic sort of message is that in any moment when something has gone a little bit haywire, when things aren't quite showing up the way that we wish they would, there's some blame to be apportioned. That it is a deep practice of both compassion and wisdom to simply reach for that blame and say, like, you know, what, if somebody has to take this, let it be me. And there can be a way that we can do this as a practice that actually deepens connection with ourselves and deepens connection with each other.

Shankar Vedantam: In some ways, I think sometimes this comes to us naturally. I'm thinking about the way, you know, parents sometimes deal with a small child. You know, the child's upset about something. The parent often doesn't get into a blame fight saying, you know, you really have to get your impulses under control. And even if the parent actually doesn't feel like the blame is on them, it's sort of easier in some ways to eat the blame when it comes to dealing, for example, with a small child.

James Cordova: That makes sense, right? Because we're safe as parents in that up power position in relation to the child. So it makes it a little bit easier for us to take on that extra burden. In our intimate relationships, there isn't a power differential, right? And so eating the blame can feel like we're putting ourselves in a down power position rather than doing something beneficent, doing something that actually is this very generous way of taking care of the situation.

Shankar Vedantam: We received a question about eating the blame from listener Monique. She says that when she eats the blame in her relationship, she notices that it helps her to reconnect with her partner. But there's a catch.

Monique: What I also notice is that when I eat the blame and I apologize or I acknowledge what I did wrong or something like that, my partner tends to lean back and say, well, thank you, now let's move on. And of course I am able to do that, but now it happens, it seems to be our dynamic that I'm the one building the bridge to reconnect. And he accepts it and steps on the bridge. But how do I, because I see his part in the dynamic as well, and I don't want to blame him, but I would sometimes like for him to accept or to eat the blame as well. How do I deal with this in a constructive way? I'm very curious. Thank you.

Shankar Vedantam: What do you think, James? If only one person is eating the blame over and over again, it seems like that's a meal that would become pretty unappetizing over time.

James Cordova: Sure, for sure. Yeah. I love the example and Monique does such a nice job of describing what it's like, and I particularly love that she starts off by recognizing this really does work, building a bridge and my partner appreciates it, and we are able to move on. But the thing has this little tail that is just sort of gnawing at me, right? And it's interesting because on the one hand, the practice of eating the blame is a deeply spiritual practice, right? It's calling on us to recognize how the ego shows up to protect us from our partner. And eating the blame is sort of a way of like eating the ego, right? It gets that thing out of the way so that we can clear that space between ourselves and our partner. You know, it's really my ego between me and you. So let me get that out of the way so that I can reach out and apologize and use my agency to reconnect us. But in some ways, what Monique is pointing out is like, well, I didn't quite finish the meal. Like there's still a little bit of blame here that I wish my partner would eat, right? You know, I get that, right? Like we really want our partner to just like mirror us and do their part in doing the same thing. But it's sort of it's that extra challenge of like, oh, there's a little morsel left. Let me just let me just go ahead and finish that one too, right? Because the reconnection is really the point, right? And that all being said, you know, it's also it is also available for us to to ask, you know, for something from our partner in that spot. It is my, I, you know, I do want to accept the blame here. I do want to find our way to reconnection with each other. And I am feeling like I would also love it if you could say something similar, right? We don't want to put too much weight on that because it does start to recreate that sense of separation. But if you can plant that seed and maybe give it some time and some space to flower, you might see some change in the long run. But, but I'm thinking of that as secondary, right? Because the real practice and Monique is really showing some expertise in the spot, is to just wholeheartedly, I'm sorry for the part that I played in that. And I want us to find our way back to reconnection.

Shankar Vedantam: I think it's important to note how gender may play into our expectations around who's eating the blame in a relationship. Listener Susan wrote to us to say, I appreciated James Cordova's perspective and ideas on increasing intimacy in partner relationships. However, I became uncomfortable when he talked about eating the blame. As a woman and a social worker with a background in family violence, eating the blame is exactly what women in our culture are expected to do in intimate relationships. I think Cordova's ideas can be transformational within relationships that are structurally equal. But for many women, taking on the blame for anything that goes wrong in the relationship is what she has been socialized to do. And it does not usually result in a male partner who is more understanding, emotionally available, and willing to take more blame himself. Talk for a moment, James, about how you think gender might play into this discussion.

James Cordova: Gosh, it's such a good question. And it is certainly the case that we are all embedded and emerge out of a culture of gender socialization. You know, we sort of inherit it. We take it on without even knowing that we're taking it on. And upsides, downsides, but man, a lot of downsides for both men and women to the degree that that, you know, how I've learned how to enact my maleness, how I've learned to enact my femaleness, you know, becomes ritualized inside of the relationship. So I really understand, you know, where Susan is coming from, especially in the context of an abusive relationship, that we can find ourselves in a spot where I'm sort of being coerced to eat the blame. And I think the difference in that spot for me is in that sort of relationship, the person who's eating the blame really doesn't have any agency. They're not using their agency. Their agency's sort of been taken from them. And the heart of eating the blame is really, what is the most skillful thing that I can do in this moment for the benefit of my partner, for the benefit of myself, and for the benefit of the relationship simultaneously? And sometimes, that is to recognize that we are caught in a pattern that is diminishing me and therefore diminishing you. And to continue to perpetuate that pattern isn't really so much eating the blame as it is remaining stuck.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if I can propose something of a test. Clearly, there are situations where people are in unequal relationships, abusive relationships, and I don't think I'm hearing you say that they should be consistently eating the blame in those situations. But equally, there are many situations where people are not in abusive relationships, but they find it really difficult to eat the blame. Is one test to ask yourself, is it my ego that is keeping me from eating the blame? And if the answer to that question is yes, that is a situation where you should try to eat the blame.

James Cordova: Beautifully said. I think that's exactly right. That really does, as you're saying it, capture for me what the difference is between the two. Because eating the blame really is originally, right? It's a spiritual practice and it's a practice to help us manage the way that our own egos can scuttle the space of intimacy between ourselves and our partners. And so to the degree that we can do that, like recognizing is the thing that's keeping me from eating the blame right now, my ego, then I know I'm engaged in the practice. And if the thing that is making me eat the blame is some unequal power dynamic in the relationship, it isn't my ego, then that's not the same thing.

Shankar Vedantam: So strategies like acceptance and eating the blame are clearly not going to be panaceas for all relationships. And it's worth pointing out that not all relationships might be worth saving. We heard from listeners who were grappling with how to know whether their relationship fell into that not worth saving category. Here's a message we received from one listener who wanted to remain anonymous.

Anonymous: James Cordova said that if something diminishes us as a person, then accepting it is too high a price to pay. How do I put that advice together with your acceptance advice? For example, let's say you're dealing with what you called a perpetual issue, and the other person reacts in a way that diminishes you. Criticism, name-calling, etc. What do you do then? How do you ask them to see that? What I'm asking is, do you communicate that to someone to give them a chance to change? Can you even do that? Or do you have to come to terms with it and then choose whether you can live with it or not?

Shankar Vedantam: So, first off, James, I just want to say that I hear the anguish that this question springs from. But how do you draw a line between behavior that may be hurtful but changeable, and behavior that is potentially abusive and a sign that you should probably end your relationship?

James Cordova: Yeah, I can feel the anguish in the question as well. The first step, almost always, maybe to the point of always, does have to begin with a kind of radical acceptance. We have most likely changed everything that we can change. And it's hard sometimes to tell, is this a mezzanine level problem and we just need to keep working it? Or have we reached that point when really what I'm dealing with, what you're dealing with, are the places where the degree of change that we want is just not available? So when we start with radical acceptance, like maybe this just is who you are, and we've done our level best to change, and this is who I am, and I've done my level best to change, and this is just the truth of who we are together, sometimes we have to stop beating our head against the wall long enough to take a step back to see that the efforts that we are grappling with to try to get that change are actually part of what's keeping us stuck. And from that place, then we get to make hopefully a decision that's rooted in care for you and care for me, that the cost of admission for me, the cost of admission maybe for you, into this relationship is simply too high. And then we can choose to move forward separately, but sometimes we can't make that choice until we've stopped trying so hard to change.

Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, the payoff of doing the hard work in your relationship. Plus, we hear from listeners about their techniques to make relationships last. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

No other organ brings together science and spirituality quite like the human brain.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever met a couple who've been together for 40 or 50 years? We often assume that these people were an ideal match, and that the love that they have for each other is special and rare. But chances are good that these relationships succeed not because they are wildly in love or meant to be, but because they are adept at navigating conflicts and supporting each other through tough times. James Cordova is a psychologist at Clark University. He's the author of The Mindful Path to Intimacy, Cultivating a Deeper Connection with Your Partner. James, I'd like to start this segment with a listener story. It comes from Richard, who says he and his wife will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next year.

Richard: We are very fortunate to share similar outlooks on life. However, in our retirement, we have come up with a house rule that states, he or she who is doing any task can do it any damn way they want. This applies to frying eggs, cleaning a room, or mowing the lawn, and any myriad of other endeavors. For us, this affirms that any differences in the time taken or in the final result are not worth undermining the self-confidence and abilities of the other person. It is not necessarily easy to do, but it is very useful to be able to stand back and zip one's lip.

Shankar Vedantam: I think what Richard is saying is that if one partner does the dishes, or mows the lawn, or handles the taxes, the role of the other partner is not to offer criticism, or feedback, or suggestions, or advice, but just say, thank you.

James Cordova: Exactly. I love this. I love this example so much. And what Richard is sort of pointing out is that he and his wife have solved the chef sous chef problem. You can tell they must have moved through a moment when they were giving each other a lot of feedback, right? When there were too many chefs in the kitchen, you know? And I love this, that they have made their own way to this place where like, if I'm making a souffle, stay out of my kitchen, right? Let me make it my way. And when you're making the souffle, you can make it any way you want, right? Like that, too many chefs in the kitchen problem is real. And, and, you know, especially I love that this emerged after retirement, right? When, when, well, I didn't, I wasn't in the kitchen before, and now I am. And we had to learn how to make room for each other. And I think the challenge when couples are, are resolving that chef, sous chef pattern, is that you have to give the other person the space to, you know, burn an egg every once in a while until they develop their own, okay, this is how I do it. And we're both capable of doing things. And that's just a much more satisfying, and as it turns out, a much sexier way to be in relationship.

Shankar Vedantam: Here's another story of acceptance that we received from listener Nakia, who's been married for nine years.

Nakia: Beginning of my marriage, I was really focused on getting my husband to work out as much as I did, or just a little bit. He worked from home, he didn't really work out much, and I just saw how it affected his mood and his relationship with everyone. I used to like buy workout clothes, buy workout shoes, get the exercise videos ready on the Peloton, but he just was not into the Peloton, or running, or anything that I was really into. Over time, I just let it go, and I just accepted that he was not maybe a workout person, but it just turned out that he just didn't like the type of exercise that I did, and he loves to play soccer. He found the soccer team, and he plays soccer religiously in the morning, and he gets the benefits of working out without feeling like he's doing something he doesn't want to do in his love for soccer.

Shankar Vedantam: So I think Nakia makes a really important point here, James. When we're trying to get our partner to do something, we often assume that if they don't like doing a specific activity in a given category, they're going to dislike every activity in that category. So if your spouse doesn't like running, it must be that he doesn't want to work out at all.

Shankar Vedantam: Or if your partner doesn't want to go dancing with you on a Saturday night, it must mean that she only wants to stay home and be introverted. What are your thoughts on Nakia's story here, James?

James Cordova: I love Nakia's story and I love how it just illustrates that it is not at all uncommon that pressure actually plugs the system. There's a phenomenon in psychology that we talk about as like control-counter control, that when we are experiencing pressure that we can feel from others, it's almost a basic mammalian instinct to dig our heels in. Even if what the other person is trying to force us to do is something that we would like, like we really like chocolate and they're trying to like force chocolate in our mouth. We're like, what are you trying to do? Get that away from me. So when we're pushing on a partner, we can often get pushback, that's just a natural human tendency, and the relationship can get stuck in that spot where it's like pressure resist, pressure resist. And if we can notice that that's happening, do what Nakia is talking about, like, oh, I noticed I tried and it didn't work, and then I tried and it didn't work, and then I tried and it didn't work, and then I tried, well, let me try something different. What if I step back and just like open the field and let my partner find their own way? Then the system almost resets in a way where, rather than having to resist you, now I get to like just seek around inside our shared environment and just have a much higher chance of finding my way into something that really does call to me. And so, you know, I love that she provided her partner with that space, and when he wasn't having to fight her anymore, he found his way to like, oh, this is the thing that moves me.

Shankar Vedantam: You say that one benefit of acceptance is that it tends to generate what you call intimate safety, the sense that you can be fully yourself with the other person. What does this feel like, James?

James Cordova: It feels like comfort, right? It feels like what we're wanting to be able to offer to each other is that experience that you're my safe harbor of all the people in the world. You're the person who I most feel comfortable and safe being my actual authentic, vulnerable self with because I know that when it comes right down to it, you love me and accept me just the way I am, including and maybe even because of the places where I know I'm imperfect. I know this is a place where I get reactive, I know this is a place where I tend to fall down, I'm doing my best out here, and I know that for you, I don't have to be perfect and with you, I'm safe and therefore, I get to try and even fail because I know that I'm in safe territory.

Shankar Vedantam: I understand that you yourself had a powerful experience of intimate safety in your relationship with your wife, James, when she went away on a trip and you were very unhappy about it. Tell me what happened and how it turned out.

James Cordova: My partner went away with some old college friends to a concert, and there was something about it that just felt like, I don't really want you to go or I would want to go with you. I just felt that missing in it. But of course, my value is to support my partner's autonomy. So this is something that you really want to do. I'm feeling a particular way about it, but I want to support you in doing it. And so please go and have a wonderful time, which she did. But I noticed when she got back that I was feeling really hurt, and just a lot of sort of like sadness and upset about it. And I was trying to think my way through it, like, what is this about? And can I manage this on my own? And maybe I'm just being like irrational. And it was wholly irrational. Like there was no, there was nothing logical about it. And the key to intimate safety, and the way that this played out in my relationship, is that I knew it didn't have to be rational. I didn't have to justify what I was experiencing emotionally. I could still just take it to my partner and say, I can't defend this. I don't know where this is coming from, but I'm just feeling like really hurt. And maybe just a little bit, you know, I don't know, maybe it's abandoned in this spot. And I just need you to like know that and like care. And of course, you know, my partner met that with warmth and kindness and compassion and understanding. And for me, that really is the epitome of the experience of intimate safety, that something as vulnerable as this, you know, indefensible emotion that I'm having, it's still real. And I don't have to hide it from her.

Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering, James, whether separation can be useful in some cases to give a couple a break from their issues and gain perspective on their relationship. We heard from a listener named Ellen, who says she and her husband were married for decades and that she was the fern and he was the cactus in their relationship. She writes, I was desperate to have a loving marriage, but I think that all my striving pushed him away. Finally, after about 35 years, I was in so much pain, I asked for separation. We were apart for three years. When we came back together, we could appreciate the things that brought us together in the first place. During that time apart, we both learned and changed. It was as if we had pushed a big reset button. Our last ten years together were really the best. Being able to accept him as he was, and him being able to appreciate me for who I was, changed everything. I lost him to cancer three years ago. I am finally starting to find my way without him. He was the only man I ever loved. I was able to tell him that I never stopped loving him and was able to be with him during his illness. It was a privilege to be at his side. James, you say that it can be sometimes helpful to do what Ellen did here. She reminded herself of what had first drawn her to her partner. What is the advantage of engaging in this kind of mental activity and can a separation help people do exactly that?

James Cordova: Such a beautiful story. And I love how she is, she's actually demonstrating that thing that we were talking about earlier about eating the blame, right? As she was able to reflect on their relationship and see, at least partly, I was pushing pretty hard. And like we were talking about before, he may have been resisting pretty hard. And that stuckness, they were unable to resolve, well, they were pouring so much energy into the stuckness, taking that step back. And boy, what a step back, three years of stepping back, to give ourselves space and to recapture all the energy that we were using to struggle with each other, to sort of nurture our own growth, and then to come back together and find a way of being with each other that, again, reminded ourselves of who we actually are outside of this struggle, what initially attracted us to each other, and just all the other stuff that was here to be valued. So that space, the stepping away from the struggle, is often necessary in order to free that energy, to find a more collaborative and connected way forward. You know, they created that space, and it actually led to growth and reconnection, which is wonderful. So we can create that space sometimes on our own, inside the relationship, if we just step back from the struggle for a while and let something else grow in that space. And sometimes it's hard to DIY it, and we can benefit from bringing in a professional to help us discover how we're perpetuating the stuckness, so that we can begin to loosen it.

Shankar Vedantam: James Cordova is a psychologist at Clark University. He's the author of The Mindful Path to Intimacy, Cultivating a Deeper Connection with Your Partner. James, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

James Cordova: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you've gotten to the end of this episode, and you still want more Hidden Brain, please consider signing up for our free newsletter. In each edition, we'll bring you new and interesting insights on human behavior, along with a brain teaser and a moment of joy. To sign up, go to news.hiddenbrain.org. That's N-E-W-S dot hiddenbrain dot org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.