by Jonah Lehrer
A good mechanic, however, will understand the limits of such assessments. After all, there are countless faults that could cause the ignition-coil error code. It could be a broken computer spitting out errant warnings. Or it could be a snapped wire connecting the coil and the sensor. “That’s why you got to open her up,” Jeff says. “I start at the coil, but then I literally grab the wiring and start tracing it back. It’s going to go under the car, and into a little crevice you can’t get into, and under the seat, and all the way to the other side to the computer. And I’ve got to trace the entire thing because the problem could be anywhere.” Jeff then shows me the wiring diagram on a recent Porsche model. It looks like a labyrinth, a network of overlapping lines running off in every direction. “There are miles of these copper wires inside the car,” he says. “Not feet. Miles.”
So Jeff assesses the signal on the wire to the ignition coil. Then he looks at the surrounding circuit. If there’s an electrical problem, he wants to understand the underlying cause. Did a rat get inside and start chewing? Did the car have bodywork done? What broke the wire? “You’ve got to be curious in this job,” he says. “You really have to want to figure it out, otherwise you’ll just do what the computer says because it’s faster and you’re lazy and another customer walked through the door.”
Car repair is a metaphor for the modern age. Just as the mechanic is quickly told by the onboard computer that there’s an issue with the engine coil, so do our gadgets offer us instantaneous answers to every conceivable question. In the age of information, there’s no excuse for not knowing. Mystery is optional.
Yet, what distinguishes the best minds—whether it’s in car repair or politics, art or science—is the ability to get beyond these initial answers. The Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about a thinking mistake he refers to as WYSIATI, or What You See Is All There Is. “People are designed to tell the best story possible,” Kahneman said in a 2012 interview. “So WYSIATI means that we use the information we have as if it is the only information. We don’t spend much time saying, ‘Well, there is much we don’t know.’ We make do with what we do know. And that concept is very central to the functioning of our mind.”2
The digital world exacerbates the WYSIATI error. Those luminous screens offer up the promise of omniscience, but the world is more complicated than it appears on the first page of search engine results, or on our filtered Facebook News Feed. Likewise, those car computers are just the start of the investigation—what they tell the mechanic is rarely a complete diagnostic picture. That’s why a proper understanding of the world requires that we keep asking questions, even when our devices offer us immediate results.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz captured this process at work in a clever experiment. He presented 115 undergraduates with a logic puzzle featuring a series of keys and light bulbs. To get a reward, the students had to press two keys four times each. Given the number of keys, this meant there were seventy possible solutions, each of which led to a small monetary payout. Initial groups of students were given no instructions, which meant they had to proceed randomly, learning by trial and error.
Here’s where WYSIATI comes into play. When Schwartz rewarded students for finding a single solution, they almost never sought out alternative ones. They also gave up trying to find the more general rule determining the rewards. Instead, they repeated what worked in the past, pressing the same keys over and over. They acted like the mechanic who always obeys the onboard computer, blind to all the other possible answers.
Schwartz then reran the experiment with a twist. In this version, he asked the students to find the general rule, thus encouraging them to look beyond their initial success. This minor difference changed everything. Now, every single student found the larger pattern. Because the students were less vulnerable to the WYSIATI fallacy—they had been told that the first payout was not all there was—they kept asking questions, which led them to the real answer. Being aware of the mystery made them much better problem solvers.3
This is Jeff’s competitive advantage: he knows what he doesn’t, which makes him less vulnerable to the curse of WYSIATI. “I’m real stubborn,” he says. “My partner is always telling me to give up, cut my losses, but I gotta get to the bottom of it.” Jeff then smiles, chuckles to himself. “This is gonna sound bad, but it’s like when the Lakers are down with two minutes left and Kobe just opens up, just starts hitting shots. That’s pure determination, you know? He’s not going to lose, and I’m not going to lose.”
And that’s why the Porsche 911 that wouldn’t turn off was so upsetting. Jeff had been working on the car for three months. He’d spent dozens of unbillable hours on the vehicle, investigating every relevant mechanical element in the engine. He’d looked at the ignition electronics and the transmission and the starter. But none of them were broken; Jeff was totally confused. “I was losing my fucking mind,” he says. “I’d see that car every day and it would be taunting me, reminding me that I couldn’t figure it out.”
Jeff’s first break came when he began looking at a series of seemingly unrelated electrical issues. The brake lights would flicker and stay on, and sometimes the convertible top would freeze. “There’s no reason these should have anything to do with the engine,” Jeff says. “The computer would never tell you to check them. No repair book would tell you to check them. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I figured I might as well try.”
Mindfulness
Ellen Langer is a scientist of the mind who became famous for studying our mindlessness. People do so many seemingly stupid things, Langer says, but most of these errors share a common cause: we don’t like to think. Thinking is hard work. It’s easier to be thoughtless. “Social psychology is replete with theories that take for granted the ‘fact’ that people think,” Langer wrote in one of her first papers. With her usual audacity, she then went on to insist that most of those theories were false.4
Langer backed up these bold claims with a series of highly influential studies.5 In one classic paper, she showed that allowing subjects to choose their lottery tickets led them to assign the tickets a much higher value, even though the randomness of the game meant their choice was meaningless. They knew this—they just didn’t think about it. In another experiment, Langer and a colleague approached a student at a copy machine in the university library. As the subject was about to insert his coins into the copier, Langer asked if she could use the machine first. If people were thoughtful creatures, then we’d be far more likely to let a person with a valid reason (“I’m in a rush”) cut in line. But that’s not what Langer found. Instead, she discovered that offering people any reason at all, even an utterly meaningless one (“I have to make copies”), led to near-universal submission. It’s not that people aren’t listening, Langer says—it’s that they’re not thinking. Most of life is lived on autopilot.6 “We’re not just not there,” she says. “We’re often not even there enough to know we’re not there.”7
One of the primary symptoms of mindlessness—and a leading reason it leads to thinking mistakes—is that it causes us to neglect mystery, even when it’s blindingly obvious. In the 1960s, the psychologist John Yellott began conducting a new kind of intelligence test on students at Stanford University.8 He ushered each subject into a small, soundproofed room containing a chair, a table with two keys, and a Sylvania electroluminescent display, the same sort of monitor used on the Apollo command module.
Yellott would then explain the study. For every trial, there were two possibilities: the display would either show an X or a Y. The subject was to predict which letter would appear next, signaling his guess by pressing one of the keys.
Two distinct strategies can be used during this task. The first is called the maximizing strategy. It goes this way: after watching the letters turn on for a few rounds, maximizers decide always to pick the one that appears most frequently. In the Stanford study, for instance, the letter Y was programmed to appear 80 percent of the time. This
means that a maximizer would press Y again and again; she’d never touch the X key.
When you give an animal this sort of test, they tend to act like maximizers. Monkeys, goldfish, pigeons, rats—they all use this rudimentary yet effective strategy. Instead of trying to solve the pattern, they accept the mystery and settle for being right most of the time.9 One species, however, doesn’t engage in maximizing behavior: human beings. We rely on what’s called a matching approach. In Yellott’s experiment, the students tried to “match” their guesses to the average probability of the letters, so they guessed Y about 80 percent of the time and X the remainder.
After the experiment was over, Yellott interviewed the students about their strategies. Most said the matching was an attempt to decipher the pattern; they wanted to solve the system, not just keep pressing a single letter. Unfortunately, their clever solutions were illusions. While Ys appeared 80 percent of the time, the exact distribution of letters followed an utterly random sequence. The overconfidence of the human subjects impacted their performance, so that they only guessed the correct bulb around 68 percent of the time. What’s worse, they never changed course; they failed to learn from their failures, even after watching hundreds of letters on the screen. As the Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow wrote in a review of the literature, “The remarkable thing about this is that the asymptotic behavior of the individual, even after an indefinitely large amount of learning, is not the optimal behavior.”10 When it comes to this guessing game, goldfish routinely outsmart us.
Why are humans so bad at predicting the letters? Because we mindlessly deny the mystery. We treat it like a puzzle instead. We’ve got these big brains, Langer says, but we often use them in ways that minimize their powers. “If we admit there’s mystery, then we also have to admit that we don’t have as much control as we’d like,” Langer says. “And that’s scary. So instead we just repeat our mistakes. That’s the sort of behavior that mindlessness leads to.”
But Langer wasn’t content to document our mental sins. After becoming the first tenured female psychologist at Harvard, she became increasingly interested in studying the solution to mindlessness, which she refers to as mindfulness. When we’re mindful, we are “actively drawing distinctions, making meaning, or creating categories,” Langer wrote.11 In other words, we’re paying attention. But this isn’t the sterile attention of the traditional classroom, in which being attentive means “holding something still,” or memorizing the facts recited by the teacher. Instead, Langer sees mindfulness as a way to realize that reality is never still, and that what we know is only a small sliver of what there is. Mystery abounds. “Mindfulness is really about noticing new things,” she told me. “When you notice things, that puts you in the present, but it also reminds you that you don’t know nearly as much as you think you know.… We tend to confuse the stability of our attitudes and mindsets with the stability of the world. But the world outside isn’t stable—it’s always changing.” Mindfulness helps us see the change. Even better, it turns ordinary life into an infinite game, helping us enjoy the uncertainty that is everywhere.
How can we become more mindful? For Langer, the answer isn’t yoga or Transcendental Meditation or some expensive ritual that involves a top-secret mantra. (“The people I know won’t sit still for five minutes, let alone forty,” she told Harvard Magazine in 2010.)12 It doesn’t require unplugging from the internet or going to a mindfulness-certified therapist. Instead, Langer’s advice for those seeking mindfulness begins with an acknowledgment of their ignorance. If mystery neglect is a problem caused by mindlessness, its treatment involves mystery appreciation. “I always ask people, ‘How much is one and one?’ ” Langer says. “And they say ‘Two,’ of course. And then I remind them that one and one isn’t always two. You put one pile of snow on top of another pile of snow, you still have one pile of snow. Add two pieces of gum together and you’ve still got one piece of gum. And so on.” Langer isn’t arguing with arithmetic—she just wants people to recognize that the truth is conditional and the universe is full of surprises. “When we’re mindless, we rely on absolutes,” she says. “It was like this before, it will always be this way in the future. But that’s not the way the world works. It’s much more mysterious than that.”
In one study, conducted with Alison Piper, Langer introduced a new object in two different ways. Sometimes, the object was described in absolute terms (“This is a dog’s chew toy”), and sometimes it was described conditionally (“This could be a dog’s chew toy”). The subjects were then asked to use the object to solve a problem, such as erasing a mark on a piece of paper. The question was whether the subjects would think to use the dog toy to accomplish the task. The results were clear: only those introduced to the object in a conditional manner were able to use it creatively, finding ways to use the chew toy as an eraser.13 Because the conditional script introduced a hint of the unknown (it might not be a dog’s chew toy), subjects were far more effective at dealing with the challenge.
Mindfulness is often described as a practical thinking tool, a trendy productivity hack. But for Langer, mindfulness is about the experience of delight. “Do you remember how much fun tic-tac-toe used to be, until you mastered the game?” Langer asks. “Or look at the little kid in the elevator. They’re so excited to press the buttons because they can’t reach the buttons. How many adults are excited to be in an elevator?” Langer’s point is that mastery is tedious—it’s the mastering that compels our attention. “I always tell people the easiest way to be mindful is to throw yourself into a new activity that fully engages you. It’s going to engage you because you don’t know how to do it. It’s still a mystery. And when you’re fully engaged, you should remind yourself that that’s the way you should feel all the time. Not knowing is what makes you feel alive. Not knowing is what gives you energy. Not knowing is the fun part.”
Langer has followed her own advice. When she was fifty years old, she decided to start painting. It had been a rainy summer, too rainy for tennis, and Langer found herself telling a friend that she’d always wanted to try painting, so why not now? The subjects of her art are varied—she paints her dogs, the Cape Cod sunset, friends in funny poses, old furniture. Sometimes she paints on old wood shingles; other works are done on vast stretched canvases, bought on sale at the local art-supply store. Langer is now an accomplished artist, represented by fancy galleries, but she still mostly paints because of how it makes her feel. (“When I don’t want to paint, I don’t paint,” she says.) For Langer, the creative act allows her to confront the world in a more mindful manner; the art reinforces her science. “It’s not until you try to make a painting that you’re forced to really figure out what you’re looking at,” she says. “I see a tree and I say that tree is green. Fine. It is green. But then when I go to paint it, I have to figure out exactly what shade of green. And then I realize that these greens are always changing, and that as the sun moves across the sky, the colors change, too. So here I am, trying to make a picture of a tree, and all of a sudden I’m thinking about how nothing is certain and everything changes. I don’t even know what a tree looks like.”
For Langer, a good painting is a model for the good life. Not the work itself, but the making of it. When Langer settles down with her brushes and oil paints and that intimidating blank canvas, she doesn’t expect perfection. Perfection would be boring. She knows that she will make mistakes, that she will put down paint in the wrong places, that her portrait will never match her vision. Her simple goal is to stay interested in the artwork for as long as possible, to somehow see what she’s never before seen. In one study, Langer instructed artists to persist with their art regardless of what happened. It didn’t matter if they made an errant line or got the color wrong—they had to “keep going forward.” And you know what happened? These pictures, full of accidents and flaws, ended up being preferred by everyone else. “If you’re doing it right, then the mistakes can be a window into something new and genuinely beautiful,” Langer says.
“Instead of just following some plan, they force you to exist in the present. They force you to really look at what you’re doing. And when you look closely, when you really look, you realize that you don’t know as much as you think you do. When it comes down to it, you don’t know much at all. That, right there, is the start of mindfulness.”
Corrosion
Jeff’s first car was a 1963 Ford Ranchero that he bought for $1,500. Two weeks after he bought it, the car broke down. “The problem was, I spent all my money buying it,” Jeff says. “But I had girls to see, things to do. I was fifteen. I needed a car!” So Jeff begged the owner of an auto-parts store to let him work in exchange for inventory. (The Ranchero needed a new fuel pump and radiator.) After scrubbing the bathroom and mopping the floors for a few months, Jeff graduated to the service center, where he changed oil and repaired brakes. It was satisfying work—“I learned that I liked fixing stuff,” Jeff says—and the paychecks led him to drop out of high school.
After a decade toiling in various repair shops, Jeff decided to open his own garage, specializing in Porsches. He found a small space on Craigslist and waited for customers. “Sat on my hands for a month, and I was like, ‘What did I do? Was this a huge mistake?’ ” But then a few Porsches came in; word spread that Jeff could fix anything. Before long, he was working on those repairs that even the dealers couldn’t figure out. People started shipping him their Porsches from all over the country.
Which brings us back to that 911 that wouldn’t turn off. Jeff spent the first few weeks checking all the obvious suspects: “A problem like that, you assume it’s an ignition issue. Maybe a faulty fuel pump, starter, stuff like that.” But all those parts were working perfectly. “I opened up that engine and put it back together, but it still didn’t work.” Or rather: the engine still wouldn’t stop working.