Page 135 - The Social Animal

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Social Cognition*

In his masterpiece, Public Opinion, the distinguished political ana-
1
lyst Walter Lippmann recounts the story of a young girl, brought
up in a small mining town, who one day went from cheerfulness
into a deep spasm of grief. It seems that a gust of wind had sud-
denly cracked a kitchen windowpane. The young girl was incon-
solable and spoke incomprehensibly for hours. When she was
finally able to speak rationally, she explained that a broken pane of
glass meant that a close relative had died. She was therefore
mourning her father, whom she was convinced had just passed
away. The young girl remained disconsolate until, days later, a
telegram arrived verifying that her father was still very much alive.
The girl had constructed a complete fiction based on a simple ex-
ternal fact (a broken window), a superstition (broken window
means death), fear, and love for her father.
In the Middle Ages, it was common practice for Europeans to
empty chamber pots—containers that stored a day’s worth of urine
and excrement— by throwing the contents out the window onto the
street below. The waste matter would remain in the street, breeding
pestilence and disease. To the modern mind, the practice seems
primitive, barbaric, and downright stupid, especially when one con-
siders that the ancient Romans had developed indoor plumbing. So
how did the chamber pot come into being? During the Middle Ages,
a belief arose that not only was nudity sinful but that an unclothed
body was subject to attack by evil spirits. Because of that belief, the

*I am indebted to my friend and colleague Anthony Pratkanis for drafting the
initial version of this chapter.