On Jane Austen and Cognitive Bias—Or on Persuasion
Toward the end of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, protagonist Anne Elliot has a short but lively discussion with an acquaintance named Captain Harville about the constancy of love. The conversation is rather playful; all the more because Captain Wentworth, the man whom Anne loves, is within earshot. Anne does not know whether Captain Wentworth can hear her, but the possibility that he might makes what is said especially significant (spoiler alert: he heard her, which ultimately helps to unite the two lovers). About the constancy of love, Anne laments what she takes to be a peculiar and unfortunate power of women: women love longer than men and will keep on loving even “when existence or when hope is gone."1
The discussion between Anne and Captain Harville is sparked by the decision of Captain Benwick, their mutual acquaintance, to quickly remarry. Anne makes the point that for women, it is much more difficult—if not impossible—to move on so soon from the person they loved. Anne links this idea to gender roles and opportunities. Men go to work, out to sea, and have all sorts of other occupations, while women 'stay behind’ at home and are largely left to themselves with little to distract them from romantic ideation. Captain Harville passionately disagrees with Anne. He tries to convince her that men are as capable of deep attachment and of true, lasting love as women. After a short interruption to their conversation, Anne insists that she has been misunderstood. She believes that men are as capable of ardent love as women. It is only that, in general, men are able to more swiftly move than women when there is no longer any hope of being with a beloved person. The two continue to present arguments back and forth, in a friendly way, until finally Anne points out, in response to Captain Harville's question of how either of them could possibly prove any of their claims:
“We never shall. We never can expect to prove any thing upon such a point. It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favor of it which has occurred within our own circle; many of which circumstances (perhaps those very cases which strike us the most) may be precise such as cannot be brought forward without betraying a confidence, or in some respect saying what should not be said.”2
Jane Austen shows herself to be a perceptive psychologist here. The past couple of decades has witnessed an explosion of research in cognitive science on biases and heuristics—rules or shortcuts in the way we think, particularly when we make decisions and judgments, which make pragmatic use of a limited subset of all possible features of complex situations. Through Anne's observations, Austen describes first of all what has come to be known as motivated reasoning. When we are motivated to believe something, we often search for examples in our memory and surroundings that 'prove' what we had already wanted to believe. In the case described by Austen, one has an initial bias in favor of one’s sex (about which one presumably knows more than about the other sex). One then proceeds to add as evidence any circumstances that lend support to the idea.
Anne conspicuously uses the details of her own situation to make a more general point. She has never stopped loving Captain Wentworth. Hence, given that she is a woman, it is woman—not man—who is capable of the most enduring love. Here we also see at work what has come to be known as the representativeness bias. Anne has intimate knowledge of herself and of her enduring love. She uses the single case (n=1)—her own as a woman—to extrapolate characteristics belonging to a much larger category: all women.
Austen furthermore describes in this passage what more than 150 years later will become known as the availability heuristic. When we want to determine how common a particular phenomenon is—say, how often something occurs within a given period of time—we tend to base our frequency judgments on how readily we can recall them and imagine such phenomena. That is, we use how available or accessible the evidence is to us as a baseline to judge how often a phenomenon actually happens. As Austen illustrates through Anne, we make use of our own experiences and memories to judge how widespread certain phenomena really are.
(Incidentally, you might ask, on what else could we possibly base our judgments of others and the world, if not on our own experiences and our own being? Aside from the testimony of others, the aim of much of science and of quantitative research is to do precisely this: to move beyond the single, individual case, toward the statistical average of a given population.)
Finally, Austen gestures toward what is known as vividness in contemporary social psychology: how psychologically striking a particular event is to us. We tend to overestimate the frequency of very good or very bad events (in technical terms: events with high affective valence). We pay attention to and recall vivid events more readily and we therefore tend to think that they occur more often than they do. Austen alludes to the circumstances that 'strike us the most'. These are the events that we tend to remember, which become more readily available to us in our memory, and which we therefore tend to give more weight in our judgments and deliberations than we ought to. We overestimate and inflate the significance of these events. And, of course, few situations are as striking to us as loving someone without hope.
So, who is right—Anne or Captain Harville? Probably neither, although Anne (Austen) is certainly right to draw attention to the fact that women, who were largely dependent on men, were significantly less free in many ways to move on from them than vice versa. As for the question of whether the love of women or men is more lasting, I do not find it especially interesting even if it could somehow be settled. I am too much of an individualist for that. You’ll never meet the ‘average’ man or woman. What matters is the particular, flesh-and-blood person in front of you.
I love finding early descriptions of psychological phenomena in fiction that have later been formulated as psychological theories and studied more rigorously. Of course, Jane Austen did none of the research that gives us the (ongoing) list of heuristics that we regularly use in our thinking. She did not study the biases that sometimes result from these heuristics. She knew none of the theories, but she intuitively knew about at least some of their contents and workings. The ideas are right there in that small passage near the end of Persuasion.
For what it’s worth, as Yukio Mishima writes in Onnagata: "One explains nothing by merely giving it a name."3
Austen, Jane. (1818/2004). Persuasion. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. p. 189.
Ibid. p. 188-189.
Mishima, Yukio. (1966). Death in Midsummer and Other Stories. Translated by Donald Keene. New York: New Directions. p. 142.