hapter Two:
Psychological Traps.What
AreThey?
"Even when it no longer makes sense,we may step up our efforts
to save a relationship or a career which is yielding diminishing returns.
Not knowing when to cut our losses,we continue to pour money into an aging
automobile, a risky investment or a doubtful poker hand. Caught in traps
of our own devising we can only climb out by understanding how they work".
By: Jeffrey Z. Ruben
Psychology Today
March 1981
You place a phone call and are put on hold.
You wait. And then you wait some more. Should you hang up? Perhaps. After
all why waste another second of your valuable time? On the other hand if
you do hang up you'll only have to call again to accomplish whatever business
put you on the phone in the first place. Anyway, you have already spent
all of this time on hold so why give up now? You wait some more. At some
point you finally resign yourself to the likelihood you have been put on
hold forever. Even as you hang up however, your ear remains glued to the
receiver hoping to the bitter end you did not spend all of your time waiting
in vain.
Almost all of us have spent too much time caught in little traps. Even
when it no longer makes sense some of us continue to spend money on a failing
automobile or washing machine, a risky stock investment or a dubious relationship.
Some of us simply do not know when to cut our losses and get out. The same
goes for more serious situations. Some of us remain longer then we should
in a marriage or love relationship, a job or career, or a therapy which
is yielding diminishing returns. On a larger scale, entrapment is part
of the dynamics in political controversies: Iran-Contra, Watergate, the
Meech Lake Accord.
A common set of psychological issues and motivations underlies all such
situations. A process of entrapment which shares many of the characteristics
of animal traps and con games has been studied in a variety of laboratory
and natural settings. As researchers we are attempting to describe the
properties of psychological traps; what they have in common, where they
lurk, whom they tend to snare and how they can be avoided.
To grasp psychological entrapment we must first comprehend the simplest
traps of all physical traps for animals. Animal traps are ingenious devices
devilishly clever and efficient, and utterly sinister in their effect on
their victims. What properties then make animal traps work?
First of all an effective animal trap must be able to lure or to distract
the quarry into behaving in ways which threaten its self-preservation.
Second, an effective animal trap permits traffic in one direction only.
Third, an effective trap is often engineered so the quarry's very efforts
to escape entrap it all the more. Finally, an effective trap must be suited
to the particular attributes of the quarry it is designed to capture.
Some types of personal interactions are psychological traps for capturing
people; they are remarkably similar to self-entrapment. Like animal traps,
their effectiveness lies in the trapper's ability to lure the quarry into
a course of action that leads to entrapment. The human motives leading
to entrapment include greed, excessive ambition and the need to save face
or to punish an adversary. Similarly, when our personal or professional
life disappoints us and our efforts to achieve a turn-around do not pay
off quickly enough, we may decide to justify the high cost by renewing
our commitment and remain on the treadmill.
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