The Shovel and the Snow

P.S. chooses a chicken with his right hand and a snow shovel with his left. The patient has been shown two pictures at once: a chicken claw and a snow scene.

His brain's two halves have been surgically separated. The claw goes to the half that speaks; the snow goes to the half that does not. Each hand picks a matching picture from an array.

Asked why he chose those pictures, P.S. answers at once. The claw goes with the chicken. And, in retellings of the story, "you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

The answer connects the two objects. A chicken belongs with a claw, a shovel belongs in a shed. You can follow the reasoning without any trouble.

An honest answer can still be wrong

The answer is wrong. That does not make it a lie.

Think about the gap in your own work. Your plan says what matters. Your calendar shows where your time went. When they disagree, you may wonder whether you really meant the plan.

At company size, the same gap becomes a shadow strategy: the deck says one thing while the work follows another.

You can believe every word in that deck. You can also feel the need to explain why the calendar looks different. Being unable to close the gap does not, by itself, make you a hypocrite.

Calling it a lie assumes you know what you are concealing. P.S. did not know.

The speaking half had seen the claw, but not the snow. It supplied a reason from what it could see.

That is one patient after surgery. But Johansson and colleagues found a related gap in people whose brain halves had not been separated.

In their 2005 study, 120 people chose the more attractive face in each of 15 pairs. On three trials, researchers secretly switched the pictures. Participants held the face they had rejected, then explained why they had chosen it.

Only 13% of the swaps were noticed during the trial. Counting later discoveries too, no more than 26% were exposed.

The reasons given for swapped choices did not differ from reasons for real choices in length, certainty or detail. A confident but wrong account could sound just like an accurate one.

Faces might seem too slight a choice to matter. In 2012, Hall, Johansson and Strandberg tested moral attitudes instead. They asked 160 people to rate 12 statements, then secretly reversed the meaning of two.

Of those participants, 69% missed at least one reversal. And 53% argued for the opposite of their own original position on at least one altered statement.

You might expect to catch a switch like that. In interviews after the face study, 84% of those who reported no swap said they would have noticed one.

Put the answer beside the diary

They explained choices they never made.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes System 1 continuously handing suggestions to System 2. When things go smoothly, System 2 adopts them with little or no modification. Deliberate thought can take control when things get hard, and normally has the last word.

So asking yourself more carefully may still leave you with the same answer.

Take a thought experiment. You say family comes first. I would take that answer seriously. Then I would open the diary: 50 hours at work that week, five with family.

Ask what you did when you had time to choose. Ask what you did when work and family competed for it.

In those hours, work received ten times what family received. That difference gives your explanation something concrete to answer.

You may have had little choice about those work hours. Then the next question concerns that constraint, rather than how firmly you can repeat your belief.

The diary cannot tell you everything you value. It can show you what your stated values have not yet changed.

The record needs context too

That sounds harsh. A patient after brain surgery, a laboratory trick, faces with no strong reasons behind the choice: these are limited grounds for judging a life.

Real decisions have real reasons. Some explanations are right. Some people knowingly lie. Later split-brain research also complicates the neat picture of two separate minds, and P.S. remains one case.

All of that matters. Your calendar cannot settle every question about your motives, either. An obligation can take more time than something you care about more.

But your sincerity cannot settle those questions on its own. An explanation may be accurate; believing it does not establish its accuracy.

Give the explanation a fair hearing. Then check it against what happened, and what you do next.

P.S. had a coherent answer for the shovel. The chicken shed gave it a useful place in the world he could describe.

The shovel still belonged to the snow.

The free letter brings one idea to check against the record, most weeks.