Abstract
Chapters 11 and 12 discuss potentially far-reaching consequences of the clustered-minds multiverse for psychological phenomena as well as experimentation in the social sciences (Part IV of the book). Chapter 11 starts with the phenomenon of repetition compulsion from psychoanalysis; specifically, and without wanting to downplay the sadness of those experiences, it asks the question how a neurotic person might be able to ‘manipulate’ his environment so successfully as to always get the ‘right’ people involved in his life doing the ‘right’ things to him so that certain experiences can be repeated. As will be shown, an answer to this question is feasible within the framework of the multiverse. The chapter continues with the exciting phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecies in several spheres of life and will discuss explanations for those phenomena that have been proposed in the literature, e.g., multiple equilibria in game theory and economics. The clustered-minds multiverse will turn out to offer a general framework containing those phenomena as well as some of the explanations that have been suggested for them.
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Notes
- 1.
This statement still holds in modern psychoanalysis.
- 2.
The usual definition of self-fulfilling prophecies, to be found on the same page, is the following: “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true” (Merton 1948, 195). I opted for a different one because with parallel realities, there might not be a principal difference between right and wrong conceptions of a singular one.
- 3.
In a well-known Meta study by Rosenthal and Rubin (1978) on interpersonal expectancy effects, the above examples would fall under the category of everyday situations and are discriminated from all kinds of laboratory situations concerned with reaction time or animal learning to be dealt with in the next chapter. The studies on everyday situations exhibit a large variability of outcomes, but also reveal large effects sizes, on average, i.e., the self-fulfilling prophecy effects are strong. Only laboratory studies on animal learning and psychophysical judgments exhibit even stronger effects (see for those comparisons Rosenthal and Rubin 1978, 380, especially Table 3). The mean effect size of the studies on everyday situations is 0.88 in Rosenthal and Rubin (1978). The classification of this effect size as being strong follows the classification by Cohen (1977).
- 4.
Although constructivism is not explicitly based on either quantum mechanics or even the multiverse interpretation of it, Watzlawick was aware of the similar spirit of a subjective interpretation of quantum mechanics and constructivism; this becomes apparent in the epilogue to his edited volume “The invented reality” (Watzlawick 1984b, 330–331) where he references and endorses Schrödinger’s perspective provided in “mind and matter” (2004 [1958]).
- 5.
The determination of exact boundaries between cases that might and might not be explained via multiple equilibria is beyond the scope of the book.
- 6.
For a sophisticated mathematical analysis of the general problem of self-fulfilling equilibria see Mas-Colell and Monteiro (1996).
- 7.
Li and Zhou (2015) are, however, more interested in the determinants of equilibria such as the nature of indirect network effects, consumer preferences and the like. I am taking the leeway here to use their example of electric vehicle adoption in the U.S. but write the story more around a ‘pure expectations’ setup. This can be done in a multiple equilibrium situation but is not exactly what these authors have had in mind.
- 8.
I do not mean to downplay the important achievements made in psychoanalytic theory and in the theory of constructivism. But I would like to argue that the clustered-minds multiverse is a theory with larger generality, in a way comprising the psychoanalytic and the constructivist’ theories.
- 9.
According to the theory of transference (e.g., Racker 2001), the patient lives through early-childhood traumata, say, with his mother, by unconsciously perceiving the psychotherapist as behaving as the mother did. And the trained psychotherapist should reflect this back in certain ways and heal the patient’s trauma in turn. Countertransference (e.g., Racker 2001; for a historical overview: Stefana 2017) is a phenomenon with two sides: unconscious emotional reactions (i.e., repetitions) of the therapist directed towards the client that are often seen as a problem of the therapist, but also diagnostic countertransference, where the therapist is able to interpret his own feelings in favor of the patient’s treatment. The challenge for the therapist is to disentangle his feelings towards the client into those two components.
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Schade, C.D. (2018). Repetition Compulsion and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies. In: Free Will and Consciousness in the Multiverse. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03583-9_11
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