Jack Nydick

The Thought-Action Discrepancy:

An Evolutionary and Psychological approach to why we don’t do what we say we will.

One of the most frustrating parts of the human experience is the discontinuity between what you tell yourself to do and the actual actions you end up taking. I am calling this the thought-action discrepancy, a very similar idea to cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort felt when your actions and or new information does not align with your beliefs, values, or thoughts. I hesitate to use this term because I am not looking into the feeling but rather what causes that divide in the first place. Everyone has goals and ideas for their future and are cognizant of the actions necessary to achieve them. One of the most common examples of this phenomon is sticking to an exercise and diet plan. I am looking to try and find the gap between the knowing/thinking about what you have to do and the actual doing of it.

 There has been an increasing focus on productivity in today's world. The notion of getting more done in less time, all while pushing toward a goal. Even though there are hundreds of thousands of hours of productivity tools and hacks to listen to or read about, people still have trouble transitioning their thoughts into actions. There have been many studies on motivation, procrastination, intentions, and many other pieces of what causes us to act. However there are not any studies that are looking at what exactly causes or prevents these cognitions from becoming action. There are a few main culprits that I will be looking into. These include, protecting the ego and the evolutionary development of human cognition. Protecting your ego can be done in many ways, one of which is self-deception (Cox, Damian, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine, "Integrity"). The ability to convince yourself that you are not insufficient in some manner and it is the outside world that is in the wrong allows you to both protect your ego and give yourself an out from doing the difficult task. Catalysts for action can include confidence, ease of the task, comfort, and many more. When we feel this way about a task we want to do the activation energy to do, the task is lowered and becomes far easier to accomplish. On the other hand inhibitors such as an attack on self image/ego, uncomfortability, newness, anxiety and more can increase the activation energy and cause the action to feel almost impossible to start. With the research done by Robert Trivers, Leonid Perlovsky, William Von Hippel, and Daniel E. Gustavson I have framed this issue of discrepancy as both caused by and a byproduct of human evolution, cultural and physical, as well as self image/ego protection. The inability to be completely objective, caused by the factors stated previously, gives us many “outs'' or excuses to avoid the tasks we claim we want to do. I contentend that the solution to closing the thought action discrepancy gap is decoupling the ego from reality and becoming truly objective. By recognizing our biases and lenses from which we see reality we can weaken its effects on our actions. While the ego is an inseparable part of the human condition, we can still strive towards this separation and experience payoffs even if we never get there. The pathology of humans has evolved through natural selection to propagate genes which give rise to themselves, this means that we are not created in a manner that allows us to fluidly flow from thought to action but as machines to be used by our genes to reproduce themselves. The ego is one of the methods by which they use to reproduce, it helps increase your view of your status and importance which at one point lead to acting in accordance to those views. By taking an objective view of the world there is no place for the mechanisms the human brain evolved to be successful in our EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation) to interfere with modern life.

Ego Protection:

It is our natural inclination to create stories out of the information we take in. Very rarely do we have an experience that we don't attach additional details to. For example, if someone said something that was hurtful the story might go something like “ they were so mean and said something hurtful” when in reality all that happened was they said something to you. The rest was interpreted, not objective. We take this perspective especially when it comes to information that could affect our self image/ego. We are biased towards proving ourselves up instead of taking the objective view. William Von Hippel and Robert Trivers write, “individuals have a lifetime of gathering and processing information in a manner that favors the self, and it would probably be difficult if not impossible for them to parse out the impact of their long-term processing strategies on their understanding of the world.” (Von Hippel, Trivers, Section 7). The ability to be objective about our encoding of reality is difficult to achieve because our default setting is self enhancing. If your reality is and always has been one in which you select for the best possible self image, separating reality from that would be like asking to separate reality from reality. The idea that you are not aware of what is stopping you is very beneficial to solving the idea of the thought-action discrepancy as it helps us frame our solution. One explanation can be genetic. “Procrastination showed substantial genetic contributions… the genetic correlation between procrastination and impulsivity was estimated to be 1.0, which suggests…there is no genetic variance left unique to procrastination. Finally, this shared genetic variation overlapped substantially (68%) with the genetic variation in the tendency to fail to activate and maintain short-term and long-term goals, thus supporting the view that goal management ability underlies the genetic commonality between procrastination and impulsivity” (Gustavson, pg 7) All three traits, impulsivity, procrastination and goal achievement ability are closely linked. The genes that account for impulsivity are generally the same for procrastination, in addition the goal achievement ability overlaps over both showing that the failure to act in accordance with short and long term goals is related to the amount of procrastination and impulsivity an individual has. This again helps explain how the traits of procrastination and impulsivity can negatively affect the ability to achieve goals which feels intuitive, what is unintuitive is the fact that these are genetic traits that different people deal with at different magnitudes.This is one of the counter arguments to my view of the thought action discrepancy. The genetic viewpoint strips not only the responsibility from the person not acting, but the autonomy to make a change as well. The ego does not like to feel trapped with negative feelings, it will lie to you saying that it is not your fault you are not productive, it's your genetics. This invalidates the genetic viewpoint in that while it may be true that some are more prone to inaction than others, it is not a beneficial lens to look through if the goal is more action. It strips autonomy from the individual, forcing them to be at the mercy of their ego and genetics. In addition to the genetic component the younger you are the more of a discrepancy you are prone to having. “The development of cognitive skills necessary for control and coordination of thoughts and behavior is concomitant to the PFC maturation (Shallice, 1982). Therefore, the stereotypical adolescent behavior should not be considered as affective dispositions only, whatever the impulsivity, rebelliousness, priority for immediate fun over long-term planning (Buchanan & Holmbeck, 1998). It may rather reflect cognitive deficits due to an underdeveloped “braking systems,” attributed to insufficiencies of the executive functioning (Casey & Caudle, 2013).”(Jadhav, K.S. and Boutrel, B. ). The development of the prefrontal cortex has a direct relation to your goal achievement ability. Figuring out where on the spectrum of goal achievement ability you are can help you find that solid ground on which to begin overcoming the challenges that are preventing you from being higher up. By no means am I using this article to support people claiming genetics are their reason for their failures, it is not a cop out, against what the counterargument might say. It is not to say that a person should just give up because their genes are their genes, it is to say that it can give them solid ground from which to launch a “counterattack” on their genetic shortcomings. Not allowing yourself to believe the ego’s lie of “it's not your fault” is a prerequisite for action.

Another widely used ego protecting mechanism is the idea of sour grapes, claiming that which is wanted but cannot be had is not worth having in the first place. There seems to be multiple layers of defense that the information we receive from reality. From the outside in, information processing bias, then the protection of ego and self perception. The information processing bias is the first barrier of defense which aims to prevent the misaligning of information from even encoding in the first place. “If this bias does not filter out the opposing information, only then do we employ ego protective mechanisms. This differs from classic accounts that hold that the self-deceiving individual must have two separate representations of reality, with truth preferentially stored in the unconscious mind and falsehood in the conscious mind”(Von Hippel, Trivers, Section 1). The information processing prevents the “false” info from being stored at all. One area of disagreement is that the mind holds two pieces of information at once and self deception is a method of remedying that uncomfortable feeling of CD. The argument posed by Von Hippel and Trivers is that there is only one piece of information being held and info that doesn't align is not held at all. I lean more towards the side of Von Hippel and Trivers because there is no difference to our experience if we are unconsciously holding onto the truth or that we don't have the truth in our mind at all. In the end it all still boils down to the fact that objectivity in processing has been lost. By stacking these ego protective mechanisms in conjunction with cognitive dissonance we build a layered wall around our “ ego centered/prefered” reality and the raw data we take in.

The phenomena of ego threat and learned helplessness involves the use of self deception in order to justify the reduction in effort. When we believe that the outcome of taking on the task is most likely one in which we may not succeed, displaying a lack of competence, ultimately hurting the ego and self image. “Failure threatens the ego because failure may be taken as a demonstration of low ability. Ego threat may lead to performance-inhibiting anxiety, rumination, and worry, attempts to finish and escape the task quickly, or calculated reductions in effort to avoid appearing low in ability”( Arden, Klein, pg125). The reaction to ego threat is to take precautionary measures against confronting the fact that you are inadequate in some way preemptively by creating a fall back. This consists of reduced effort, lack of care, and time investment. The layers of our ego protection walls are vast, they are however identifiable, allowing us to break them down, even if the result may be failure in the task at hand. The prediction of their chances of success influences the degree to which they put in meaningful effort. It is viewed as better to fail in private by not even trying rather than trying and failing publicly. This is evolutionarily adaptive in our early history, a topic which will be discussed later. A very common way to gain the dopamine hit that actually taking on the risk and completing the task would get you is telling people that it is what you intend to do. NYU Psychology researcher Peter M. Gollwitzer is mainly credited with this discovery. In his study he had law students fill out a questionnaire asking them about their commitment to studying and how  much they were going to do. He then split those who answered with high intentions into two groups, one had a researcher confirm that the answers they chose were the ones they meant to, the other groups remained anonymous. When given the opportunity to study, the group that had their goals recognized studied less than the group that did not. “When other people take notice of one's identity-relevant behavioral intentions, one's performance of the intended behaviors is compromised.”( Gollwitzer et.al. pg616). This phenomena gives us a direct picture of one of the reasons for the thought action discrepancy, why put in the effort when you can feel the gratification from telling people you have the self identity you strive for. Being an objective observer of your thoughts and what you say will allow you to catch yourself making this fundamental mistake. It is not holding yourself accountable in most cases, it is cashing in on the quick dopamine release instead of holding out for the real thing.

We tend to not only attempt to convince others that we are made up of positive traits or morals but the ego attempts to convince the rational mind as well, often successfully. In the paper  “The association between self-deception and moral self-concept as functions of self-consciousness. Personality and Individual Differences” by Lu, H., & Chang, L., they discuss how the higher a person's moral self concept a person has the higher levels of self deception they will need to employ. This is because in order to mask the selfish wants or behaviors they must outwardly be aware of or act altruistically. “A higher concern for public interests either causes or is caused by a stronger need to hide self-interests.”(Lu,Chang, 4). the higher levels of self consciousness a person has, the more moral self concept is linked to self deception. The more aware you are of the reality around you the more you have to self deceive in order to keep the self image or ego intact. “For example, people actually donate much lower amounts to charities than they initially plan (Epley & Dunning, 2000), and 95% of people provide affirmative answers when asked whether it is morally good to assign an easy task to a partner and leave oneself a difficult task, but when asked to actually assign the tasks by tossing a coin, only 10% of the participants assign the partner the easy task”(Lu, Chang, 4). Even with the best intentions we have a difficult time following through. This is because our ego is the nucleus of our minds, everything around it is built to protect and support it at all costs. Sacred values are defined by Ginges and Atran as “Sacred values are things that communities set apart from the economic or profane aspects of everyday life.”( Ginges, Atran, 2). Our egos are sacred to our minds, they are the thing that we revolve around and control the biases and lenses through which we interpret the world. The idea of a sacred value is that it is held highest in the mind of the person who has it and it is uncompromising. There is no monetary or worldly value that is worth trading it for and has no connection to the physical world. Therefore the sacred value cannot be corrupted by anything other than the person who holds the ideal. Our self image is a sacred value that is maladaptive because we will not trade a good self image for any worldly item, blocking us from seeing reality as it is. This is another way that we are blocked from seeing the world objectively.

Evolution:

We have evolved to develop a complex psyche that has infinitely more layers of complexity than our non-human ancestors. This is both a benefit and a drawback in that it allows us to progress as a species but does not always help in the modern world. “Every piece of conceptual knowledge is inextricably connected to the emotional evaluation of a situation, and to appropriate behavior, satisfying instinctual needs. The emotional and conceptual content is not differentiated, it is one undivided state.” (Perlovsky L (2013))In non-human animals such as monkeys, the ability to “think something through”, the emotion felt, and all other parts of the psyche are perceived in unison causing a primal “ lizard brained” reaction. The ability to parse out different lenses of which to view a situation through is what stops us from making poor decisions and giving into every primal urge. Without this society itself would collapse and we would be just as violent and indulgent as monkeys. For humans, the challenge comes when we get caught in the separate aspects of thinking causing inaction. The over-analysis of information is, one, a contradiction to being aware of objective reality, and two, one of the root causes of inaction and anxiety. Anxiety had also been an adaptive mechanism in the past. Now, anxiety has become a sort of epidemic in the modern world. The feeling of always being on edge, never on solid ground is one that most people deal with more often than they would like to. We do this to ourselves as a preventative measure against the unknown, better safe than sorry is what we consciously or unconsciously tell ourselves. This internal policing of our environment is the equivalent of Gladwell's “proactive policing”. Proactive policing is looking for any reason possible to pull someone over in hopes that once you've done so, you end up finding something far worse than the infraction you originally flagged. This post-hoc justification allows you to always be in the right. If you find nothing good, you are just being safe. If you do find something, “I knew it, I was right”. This is the same viewpoint that we use when looking through the lens of anxiety, ultimately causing stress. Sapolsky goes on to write “When we activate the stress-response out of fear of something that turns out to be real, we congratulate ourselves that this cognitive skill allows us to mobilize our defenses early. And these anticipatory defenses can be quite protective, in that a lot of what the stress-response is about is preparative. But when we get into a physiological uproar and activate the stress-response for no reason at all, or over something we cannot do anything about, we call it things like "anxiety," "neurosis," "paranoia," or "needless hostility." (Sapolsky, 7). This physiological uproar causes more detrimental effects to the body and mind than any of us would like to know. The idea of proactive policing is just activating the stress response on anything and everything hoping that you will get a hit rather than analyzing the individual situations rationally and making a decision about your stress level based on logic. Proactive policing is an analogy for how an anxiety ridden person carries out their day. Loss of objectivity in favor of self protection is no longer as adaptive in our modern society which is a hedonist’s playground.

The evolutionarily adaptive mechanism of self deception no longer benefits us in modern society .Robert Trivers, one of the founders of the evolutionary psychology field, claims that self deception is a mechanism we use to convince ourselves of falsehoods in order to better convince those around us of those same things. By convincing yourself that you are not lying you can get rid of the cues that people pick up on when others are in fact lying. We no longer live in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), this means that traits that were once adaptive, take anxiety or overthinking for instance, no longer serve us in the modern environment. We now exhibit supernormal stimuli in nearly every aspect of our lives from the hyperpalatable food to the constant flow of new information via our smartphones, the brain was not designed to deal with this heightened version of stimuli. You can think of our brains in layers of complexity. The first being the “lizard brain”, it is responsible for our basic needs such as breathing and coordination as well as basic primitive urges like finding food and mates as well as survival. This is the part of the brain I described earlier that causes us to act without thinking at all. The second layer is the limbic system. This is responsible for basic behavioral and emotional reactions. This is troublesome because it is not yet complex enough to understand delayed gratification. The part of the brain that separates us from most other animals is our cerebral cortex, specifically the prefrontal cortex involved in complex thought processes. This is what allows us to come up with ideas, plans, and complex thoughts. This is the same general premise described in the book The Moral Animal by Robert Wright who cited Paul D. Mclean on his view of the brain structure. “ He calls the human brain a “triune” brain who's three basic parts recapitulate our evolution: a reptilian core (the seat of our basic drives) surrounded by a “paleomammalian” brain ( which endowed our ancestors with, among other things, affection for offspring), surrounded by a “neomammalian” brain. The voluminous neomammalian brain brought about abstract reasoning, language… (this model) nicely captures a (perhaps the) critical feature of our evolutionary trajectory: from solitary to social, with the pursuit of food and sex becoming increasingly subtle and elaborate endeavors.”(Wright, Pg.321). Unfortunately the strength that each of these layers has on controlling our actions reduces as you head outward from the lizard brain. This is why we don't always execute what we tell ourselves to do. Our limbic system is hijacking the process and indulging in the immediate satisfaction rather than the delayed. This not only affects which actions we do perform, like eating the cookie even though we said we wouldn't, it also affects which actions we don't take like getting up out of the warm bed in the early morning. Worse than inaction though is telling others about the actions we “are going to” take. This is the pattern by which we have developed as a species was very adaptive in our EEA, but in the modern world we are hyperstimulated, basically overloading our brains.

An alternate view is that we act on instincts we have developed over the course of our evolution and these are thought to be generated from reason, learning, and preferences, describing the instincts as an unconscious rational mind. In the article “Better Than Rational: Evolutionary Psychology and the Invisible Hand” the authors wrote, “Although instincts are often thought of as the polar opposite of reasoning, a growing body of evidence indicates that humans have many reasoning, learning, and preference circuits that (i) are complexly specialized for solving the specific adaptive problems our hominid ancestors regularly encountered… (iv) develop without any formal instruction; (v) are applied without any awareness of their underlying logic; and (vi) are distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. (Pinker, 1994)” (Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby). These instincts are great, they helped us survive in our original EEA but in the modern era they are not the key to action, especially not productive action. Instincts lack the ability to be objective about the environment they are currently in, they are baked into our system far before we could have ever perceived the challenges we face today. This lack of objectivity disqualifies them from helping us become more agentic.

The thought action discrepancy is a challenge that is fundamental to the human experience. In the arguments presented above the notion of ego protection, self deception, and evolutionary development lay out the causes and possible traps our brains lay for us, creating the gap. David Buss and Martie Haselton’s idea of error management theory distinctly summarizes the lived experience of our biases due to evolution. In a review Haselton and others wrote, “cognitive mechanisms can generally produce two types of errors: false positives (taking an action that would have been better not to take), and false negatives (failing to take an action that would have been better to take).”(Haselton, M.G., Nettle, D. and Murray). It is my contention that in order to reduce these errors as much as possible you need to be A, hypervigilant, and more importantly, B, objective about the world around you. The lens through which information is brought into our consciousness is tainted by ego protection and other evolutionary processes, by being hypervigilant over our level of true objectivity we can see the incoming data from the world around us more clearly. With these tools of examination we can increase our amount of aligned and purposeful behavior.

Works Cited

Ginges, Jeremy and Atran, Scott. "Sacred Values and Cultural Conflict." Advances in Culture and Psychology, edited by Michele J. Gelfand et al., New York, 2013, pubd online Mar. 2015, Oxford Scholarship Online.

Gollwitzer, Peter M., et al. "When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?" Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 5, 2009, pp. 612–18. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40575071. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

Gustavson, Daniel E., et al. "Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability: Implications for the Evolutionary Origin of Procrastination." Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1178–88. JSTOR.

Jadhav, K.S. and Boutrel, B. "Prefrontal cortex development and emergence of self-regulatory competence: the two cardinal features of adolescence disrupted in context of alcohol abuse." European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 50, 2019, pp. 2274-2281, https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.14316.

Lu, H., & Chang, L. "The association between self-deception and moral self-concept as functions of self-consciousness." Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 51, no. 7, 2011, pp. 845–849.

Perlovsky, L. "A challenge to human evolution—cognitive dissonance." Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 4, 2013, article 179, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00179.

Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Holt Paperbacks, 2004.

Von Hippel, William, and Robert Trivers. “The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–16.

Wright, Robert. The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Abacus, 1996.

Haselton, M.G., Nettle, D., and Murray, D.R. "The Evolution of Cognitive Bias." In The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by D.M. Buss, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119125563.evpsych241.