If someone made me pick which of my weaknesses I would most want to change, it would be my tendency to form and hold grudges for excessively prolonged periods of time, which we all know is unhealthy for everyone involved.
Could people with certain neurological wiring be predisposed to having this trait? The closest explanation that occurs to me is that people prone to rumination find themselves thinking over everything that happens to them over and over again to no end.
They replay memories, analyze motivations, evaluate loyalties, and while doing so, completely distort the truth. They find harmful intentions where there were none. They overlook strong evidence of loyalty when presented with just one instance of betrayal.
Why do we do this to ourselves? And why do our brains encourage this maladaptive thinking?
Our mental capacity for revisiting past memories is a miraculous feature, evolutionarily adaptive in so many ways. However, this brain function is far from reliable.
Studies have indicated that when subjects had to dig through a memory for certain information, they often recalled inaccurate versions of what really happened. What’s more, every time you pull a memory to the surface, you slightly alter it from its previous form. This phenomena has been coined “reconstructive memory.”
Due to the frowned upon use of “leading questions” during witness testimony, witnesses can be psychology primed to respond to questions differently than if they were asked less provocatively worded phrases. For example, in a psychological study examining people’s perception of car speeds, the participants were shown a video of a vehicular collision of unknown speed.
When asked “how fast do you think the car was going when it crashed into the other car?”, participants on average estimated a higher speed than when they were asked “how fast do you think the car was going when it hit the other car?”
This study implies that when we delve into the past, different mindsets can manipulate our memories into showing us what we expect to see. I imagine that a similar process lies behind the common predisposition to let the bad outweigh the good in our companions. In order for me to explain my theory behind why certain folks are more likely to develop grudges, you must humor my brief forage into some psychological terminology.
The “Big Five personality traits” is a model for classifying people based on five moving scales of various internal characteristics. Represented by the acronym OCEAN, the five factors are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Neuroticism means “the tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as [...] vulnerability.” If you are on the high end of the neuroticism spectrum, this means you are more sensitive or nervous, whereas the low end refers to those who are more secure/confident.
My idea is that some twisted part of our psyches seeks out proof of its suspicions that other people are truly out to get us. The clear lens we would usually look through gets warped by this anxiety, showing us exactly what we want to see. We fuel our unfounded fears with more lies, and come to faulty conclusions that dictate how we view the people around us.
As you can understand, it seems easy, even tempting, to search for confirmation for our anxieties. That way we are assured that our suspicions were right all along.
What is much harder is choosing to let bygones be bygones and embracing your friends despite their mistakes.
