Mental Accounts

Why do we often feel pain and sorrow in inter personal relationships?

Human is a social animal, born and nourished in a society. From birth to death we interact with lot of people and keep making interpersonal bonds. Our first interaction happens with mother, then father, relatives, friends, society, we keep interacting with people and keep creating interpersonal bonds with the entire group of persons we interact in our life.

Social need is one of the most fundamental needs of human including sense of belongingness and acceptance among their social groups.  Human have need to love and to be loved.  Whomsoever we meet in our life we unconsciously keep rating them and classifying them as per our subjective criteria.  We keep some people in our good books and some people in our bad books. We expect love, affection, respect  and support from those persons who are in our good book but the problem happens when we don’t get as much love, respect, support, understanding as we were expecting. That brings feeling of anger that subsequently converted in to frustration, pain and suffering. Interpersonal tussle is one of the most important reasons for pain and frustration in our life. In this article, by using my theory of mind and brain I will try to explain how the psychology of interpersonal relations works, how do we rate persons and how does it turn into pain or pleasure. How we can overcome it and how we can be permanently immune from this interpersonal pain and suffering

The term Mental Account was first coined was behavior specialist Richard Thaler. His research was focused towards people’s emotional response related to economical decision making but the concept of mental account is not limited to economic decisions only. We keep mental accounts for interpersonal relations too. We keep an emotional account of every person we have met in our life and it happens unconsciously and our mind doesn’t let us know about it. As explained in theory of mind and brain and previous articles that we use two systems- mind and brain for decision making. While brain is responsible for logical evaluations, mind is responsible for emotional evaluations. It was also explained that function of mind is automatic that means it keeps working and we cannot stop it. Since interpersonal relations come under mind’s jurisdiction so it keeps evaluating the persons whom we meet.

Rule of accounting says that every account should be in balance that means give should be equal to take same concept applies in mental accounting. Our mind always try to keep relationship emotions in balance that means if we have done good for someone so to keep account in balance our mind wants that person should also do good for us. If we have done something bad then our mind will be scared that in return it will also get bed. In this way we keep evaluating relationship accounts with everyone.

It can be explained by this example. The give column is about you have done for other and take column talks about what he has done for you

Mental Account of Neo for Uno
Give		Take
Activity	Value	Activity	Value
Gave him a smile	100	Praised me	800
Borrow him money	1000	Gave me respect	300
	1100		1100

 Status: balanced

This is the example of a very simple mental account kept by our mind. One of the most important phenomena is how do we rate the activities carried out in interpersonal relationship. Mind is completely subjective so everyone perceives same activity differently. You gave a smile and you rated it equal to 100 points, you borrowed him money when he was in need and you assume you have done great work for him so you rated it equal to 1000 points. (Pl note that points system shown here are completely artificial phenomena and used here only to explain and simply the concept. Whenever we do something for someone we assigned a subjective value like I have done “so much” for you. Point system is mathematical representation of “so much”) He praised you in a discussion and it was great feeling for you so you rated equal to 800 points. He gives you respect and you rate it equal to 300 but there are 100% chances that he must be rating you differently. Now see the Uno’s mental account for Neo:

Mental Account of Uno for Neo
Give		Take
Activity	Value	Activity	Value
Praised him	200	Gave me a smile	100
Gave him respect	700	Borrow me money	800
	900		900

Status: balanced

You can see that how complex is the interpersonal relationship accounting. Both person giving different rating for same activities but right now they are in happy relationship status since their relationship status is balanced but problem happens  when status is not in balance and that is phenomena with most of the people at most of the time. See the mental account of Arun and Ria:

Mental Account of Arun for Ria
Give		Take
Activity	Value	Activity	Value
Taught her music	5000	Supported me	2000
Always supported her	2000	Gave me respect	2000
Always gave her respect	3000
	10000		4000

Here status is imbalance; Arun believes that he has done lot of things for Ria but in return Ria hasn’t done same for her. As par the rule of accounting the account statement can’t be in imbalance so Arun has to make it balance now see how does he make it balance

Mental Account of Arun for Ria
Give		Take
Activity	Value	Activity	Value
Taught her music	5000	Supported me	2000
Always supported her	2000	Gave me respect	2000
Always gave her respect	3000
Mental Pain due to Ria by Hurting self (adjustment entry)	-6000
	4000		4000

Status: balance

To make account balance mind punish itself by giving pain. It is called feeling of regret. When imbalance is very huge then there will be great pain when imbalance is small there will be less mental pain but you have to suffer through this enormous mental pain and feeling of regret. This is the one of the method to bring account on balance since mental peace only at balance position and some people hurt another to bring account on balance

In the interpersonal relations, we keep noting all the things that we do for others that create lot of expectations and in return we also want to same thing for us but due to subjective difference in rating we start to believe that our partner is not fulfilling our expectations and then come sense of regret and to bring mental peace we start to hurt ourselves or hurt our partner. Here in the case Arun believed that he has done lot of things for Ria but didn’t get so much from her in return now see what Ria believed about Arun:

Mental Account of Ria for Arun
Give		Take
Activity	Value	Activity	Value
Supported him	3000	Taught me music	4000
Gave him respect	3000	Supported me	4000
Gave him love	10000	Once he disrespected me	-          2000
Hurt him by Ignoring (adjustment entry)	-6000
	6000		6000

Ria believes that she has done lot of things for Arun but he didn’t do enough things for her so status was imbalanced to bring that status on balance she started to ignore him and due to understanding two good lovers start to dislike each other. This exactly happens in each and every relationship. So in the nutshell the entire process can be explained

:

• We keep mental account of every relationship
• We keep noting down entry on two bases, what we have done for him and what he has done me
• We rate every transaction subjectively. It depends upon personality type and mood
• We note down good deeds in positive value and bad deeds in negative value
• Balance situation is called peace of mind
• Imbalance situation is when expectation doesn’t meet the experience
• To make it balance either we hurt ourselves or we hurt others.

You may say that you don’t keep mental accounts but believe me it happens automatically without knowing you. You are completely unaware about what is going on in your mind and you feel only end results that are either happiness or sorrow.

Why giving gratitude is so difficult

There are lot of stuff has been written on giving gratitude but giving gratitude is very difficult and normally ends into dissatisfaction and reason of this can be explained by mental accounts concept. Whenever we do gratitude for someone we make an entry in the give column and mind automatically demands favor in return and when you don’t get in return you start to feel sorrow. Exactly same happens when you are continuously giving gratitude to someone but he is not acknowledging your gratitude and you start to feel frustrated. That’s why giving gratitude is so tough and normally people are not able to give gratitude so if someone gives you gratitude you must acknowledge it and must give something in return that can be a smile or just a word thank you

Regret

As explained earlier, when we have done lot of things for someone as par mental account concept it automatically increases our expectations and our mind thinks that I have done so much for him so in return he should do also do lot for me but when we do not get as much in return, a gap occurs between what we expected and what we got and to cover that gap we either hurt ourselves or we hurt him. Regret is self-punishment. It’s a painful emotion and very common in interpersonal relations and reason for most of our misery. So what is the solution? How we can overcome this feeling?

State of steady wisdom

If you have read this article thoroughly till not then you must have understood the hidden process occurs in our mind whenever we interact with someone. If you can understand the system, you can control the system and you can modify the system. First of all you should understand the mental accounting system of your partner. You may be assigning a great value to an activity that is not so great for him or an activity that you think very ordinary for you may be a great importance for him so you must understand his mental accounting system and adjust your own entries. Some persons have amazing ability to understand the mind of their partner and change themselves according to person to person.

There is one more method that is bringing the mind of steady state that means deleting all the mental account and to keep only one account. The mental account with destiny, omnipresent, life or with God, you just need to keep only once account and that is with God irrespective to whomsoever you interact. Assume them representative of god and make all the entries in a single account. If you have done something good for someone that it means you have given something to God, if someone has done something good for you that mean you took something from God. If someone has done wrong with you that mean God has taken back something to you and if you have done something bad that means you have taken back your good deeds from God. Mental account with God is a continuous process and always tries to move towards balance. So in that case when you know the system you won’t feel any regret and pain since whatever happens with you, you will accept happily it as a grace of God. The state when you don’t add any happiness or sorrow, when you don’t build any expectation from someone when you don’t have any mental account with human being, when you treat everyone equally is the state of steady wisdom. At that state there is no pain, no sorrow. Everyone objective should be move towards that state.