This Will Make You Smarter

by John Brockman

  No other system for acquiring knowledge even comes close to science, but this is precisely why we must treat its conclusions with humility. Einstein knew this when he said that “all our science measured against reality is primitive and childlike, and yet,” he added, “it is the most precious thing we have.”

  The Einstellung Effect

  Evgeny Morozov

  Commentator on Internet and politics, Net Effect blog; contributing editor, Foreign Policy; author, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

  Constant awareness of the Einstellung effect would make a useful addition to our cognitive toolkit. The Einstellung effect is more pervasive than its name suggests. We constantly experience it when trying to solve a problem by pursuing solutions that have worked for us in the past, instead of evaluating and addressing the new problem on its own terms. Thus, whereas we may eventually solve the problem, we may be wasting an opportunity to do so in a more rapid, effective, and resourceful manner.

  Think of a chess match. If you are a chess master with a deep familiarity with chess history, you are likely to spot game developments that look similar to other matches you know by heart. Knowing how those previous matches unfolded, you may automatically pursue similar solutions.

  This may be the right thing to do in matches that are exactly alike, but in other situations you’ve got to watch out! Familiar solutions may not be optimal. Recent research into the occurrences of the Einstellung effect in chess players suggests that it tends to be less prominent once they reach a certain level of mastery; they get a better grasp of the risks associated with pursuing solutions that look familiar, and they avoid acting on “autopilot.”

  The irony here is that the more expansive our cognitive toolkit, the more likely we are to fall back on past solutions and approaches instead of asking whether the problem in front of us is fundamentally different from anything else we have dealt with. A cognitive toolkit that has no built-in awareness of the Einstellung effect seems defective to me.

  Homo sensus sapiens: The Animal That Feels and Reasons

  Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán

  Philosopher; founder and manager, Metodo, a transdisciplinary, transnational group of social scientists

  For the last three years, Mexican narcotraffickers have decapitated hundreds of people to gain control of routes for transporting cocaine. In the last two decades, Colombian narcoparamilitaries tortured and incinerated thousands of people, in part because they needed more land for their crops and for transporting cocaine. In both cases, the perpetrators were not satisfied with $10 million or $100 million; even the richest narcotraffickers kill, or die, for more.

  In Guatemala and Honduras, vicious battles between gangs known as maras are waged to gain control of a street in a poor neighborhood. In Rwanda’s genocide, in 1994, people who had been friends all their lives suddenly became mortal enemies because of ethnicity.

  Is this enlightened?

  These cases may seem like rarities. However, in any city, in any random street, it is easy to find a thief willing to kill or die for ten bucks to satisfy the need for heroin; a fanatic willing to kill or die in defense of a “merciful God”; a regular guy-next-door willing to kill or die in a fight after a car crash.

  Is this rational?

  Examples abound in which such automatic emotional responses as ambition, anger, or anxiety overcome rationality. Those responses keep assaulting us, like uncontrollable forces of nature—like storms, or earthquakes.

  We modern humans taxonomically define ourselves as Homo sapiens sapiens, wise wise beings. Apparently we can dominate natural forces, be they instincts, viruses, or storms. However, we cannot avoid destroying natural resources while consuming more than we need. We cannot control excessive ambition. We cannot avoid surrendering to the power of sex or money. Despite our evolved brains, despite our ability to argue and think in abstract ways, despite the amazing power of our neocortex, our innermost feelings are still at the base of our behavior.

  Neurological observations indicate that instinctive areas of the brain are active most of the time. Our nervous system is constantly at the mercy of neurotransmitters and hormones that determine levels of emotional responses. Observations from experimental psychology and behavioral economics show that people do not always try to maximize present or future profits. Rational expectations, once thought of as the main characteristic of Homo economicus, are not neurologically sustainable anymore. Sometimes people want only to satisfy a desire right here, right now, no matter what.

  Human beings do have unique rational capacities. No other animal can evaluate, simulate, and decide for the best as humans do; however, having the capacity doesn’t always mean executing it.

  The inner and oldest areas of the human brain—the reptilian brain—generate and regulate instinctive and automatic responses, which play a role in preserving the organism. Because of these areas, we move without analyzing the consequence of each action; we move like a machine of automatic and unconscious induction. We walk without determining whether the floor will remain solid after each step. We run when we feel a threat, not because of rational planning but automatically.

  Only strict training enables us to dominate our instincts. For most of us, the admonition “Don’t panic” works only when we’re not panicking. Most of us should be defined as beings moved initially by instincts, empathy, and automatic responses resulting from our perceptions, instead of by sophisticated plans and arguments. Homo economicus and Homo politicus are behavioral benchmarks rather than descriptive models. The calculation of utility and the resolution of social disputes through civilized debate are behavioral utopias, not descriptions of what we are. However, for decades we’ve been constructing policies, models, and sciences, not coinciding with reality, based on these assumptions. Homo sensus sapiens is a more accurate image of the human being.

  The liberal hyperrationalist and the conservative hypercommunitarian are hypertrophies of a single human facet. The first is the hypertrophy of the neocortex: the idea that rationality dominates instincts. The second is the hypertrophy of the inner reptilian brain: the idea that empathy and cohesive institutions define humanity. However, we are both at the same time. We are the tension of the sensus and the sapiens.

  The concept of Homo sensus sapiens allows us to realize that we are at a point somewhere between overconfidence in our rational capacities and submission to our instincts. It also allows us to improve our explanations of social phenomena. Social scientists should not always discriminate between rationality and irrationality. They should get out of the comfort zone of positivist fragmentation and integrate scientific areas to explain an analog human being, not a digital one—a human being defined by the continuum between sensitivity and rationality. Better inputs for public policy would be proposed with this adjusted image.

  The first character of this Homo, the sensus, allows movement, reproduction, preservation of the species. The sapiens allows psychological oscillation between the ontological world of matter and energy and the epistemological world of sociocultural codification, imagination, arts, technology, and symbolic construction. This combination allows understanding of the nature of a hominid characterized by the constant tension between emotions and reason, and the search for a middle point of biological and cultural evolution. We are not only fearers, not only planners. We are Homo sensus sapiens, the animal that feels and reasons.

  Understanding Confabulation

  Fiery Cushman

  Assistant professor, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University

  We are shockingly ignorant of the causes of our own behavior. The explanations we provide are sometimes wholly fabricated and certainly never complete. Yet that is not how it feels; instead, it feels as though we know exactly what we’re doing and why. This is confabulation: guessing at plausible explanations for our behavior and then regarding those guesses as introspective
certainties. Psychologists use dramatic examples to entertain their undergraduate audiences. Confabulation is funny, but there is a serious side, too. Understanding it can help us act and think better in everyday life.

  Some of the most famous examples of confabulation come from split-brain patients, whose left and right brain hemispheres have been surgically disconnected for medical treatment. Neuroscientists have devised clever experiments in which information is provided to the right hemisphere (for instance, pictures of naked people), causing a change in behavior (embarrassed giggling). Split-brain individuals are then asked to explain their behavior verbally, which relies on the left hemisphere. Realizing that the body is laughing, but unaware of the nude images, the left hemisphere will confabulate an excuse for the body’s behavior (“I keep laughing because you ask such funny questions, Doc!”).

  Wholesale confabulations in neurological patients can be jaw-dropping, but in part that’s because they don’t reflect ordinary experience. Most of the behaviors you and I perform are not induced by crafty neuroscientists planting subliminal suggestions in our right hemisphere. When we’re outside the laboratory—and when our brains have all the usual connections—most of our behaviors are the product of some combination of deliberate thinking and automatic action.

  Ironically, that’s exactly what makes confabulation so dangerous. If we routinely got the explanation for our behavior totally wrong—as completely wrong as split-brain patients sometimes do—we would probably be much more aware that there are pervasive, unseen influences on it. The problem is that we get all of our explanations partly right, correctly identifying the conscious and deliberate causes of our behavior. Unfortunately, we mistake “partly right” for “completely right,” and thereby fail to recognize, and guard against, the equal influence of the unconscious.

  A choice of job, for instance, depends partly on careful deliberation about career interests, location, income, and hours. At the same time, research reveals that choice to be influenced by a host of factors of which we are unaware. According to a 2005 study, people named Dennis or Denise are more likely to be dentists, while people named Virginia are more likely to locate to (you guessed it) Virginia [Pelham, Carvallo & Jones, Psychol. Sci.]. Less endearingly, research suggests that, on average, people will take a job with fewer benefits, a less desirable location, and a smaller income if it allows them to avoid having a female boss [Rahnev, Caruso & Banaji, 2007, unpub. ms., Harvard Univ.]. Surely, most people do not want to choose a job based on the sound of their name, nor do they want to sacrifice job quality in order to perpetuate old gender norms. Indeed, most people have no awareness that these factors influence their choices. When you ask them why they took the job, they are likely to reference their conscious thought processes: “I’ve always loved making ravioli, the lira is on the rebound, and Rome is for lovers . . .” That answer is partly right, but it is also partly wrong, because it misses the deep reach of automatic processes on human behavior.

  People make harsher moral judgments in foul-smelling rooms, reflecting the role of disgust as a moral emotion [Schnall et al., 2008, Pers. & Soc. Psych. Bull.]. Women are less likely to call their fathers during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle than during their non-fertile phase, reflecting a means of incest avoidance; no such pattern is found in calls to their mothers [Lieberman, Pillsworth & Haselton, 2010, Psychol. Sci.]. Students indicate greater political conservatism when polled near a hand-sanitizing station during a flu epidemic, reflecting the influence of a threatening environment on ideology [Helzer & Pizarro, 2011, Psychol. Sci.]. They will also judge a stranger to be more generous and caring when they hold hot coffee versus iced coffee, reflecting the metaphor of a “warm” relationship [Williams & Bargh, 2008, Science].

  Automatic behaviors can be remarkably organized and even goal-driven. For example, research shows that people tend to cheat only as much as they can without realizing they’re cheating [Mazar, Amir & Ariely, 2008, Jour. Marketing Res.]. This is a remarkable phenomenon: Part of you is deciding how much to cheat, calibrated at just the level that keeps another part of you from realizing it.

  One of the ways people pull off this trick is with innocent confabulations: When self-grading an exam, students think, “Oh, I was going to circle e, I really knew that was the answer!” This isn’t a lie, any more than it’s a lie to say you don’t have time to call your dad during this busy time of the month. These are just incomplete explanations, confabulations that reflect our conscious thoughts while ignoring the unconscious ones.

  This brings me to the central point, the part that makes confabulation an important concept in ordinary life and not just a trick pony for college lectures. Perhaps you’ve noticed that people have an easier time sniffing out unseemly motivations for others’ behavior than recognizing the same motivations for their own behavior. Others avoided female bosses (sexists) and inflated their grades (cheaters), while we chose Rome and really meant to say that Anne was the third Brontë. There’s a double tragedy in this double standard.

  First, we jump to the conclusion that others’ behaviors reflect their bad motives and poor judgment, attributing conscious choice to behaviors that may have been influenced unconsciously. Second, we assume that our own choices were guided solely by the conscious explanations we conjure, and we reject or ignore the possibility that we may have unconscious biases of our own.

  By understanding confabulation, we can begin to remedy both faults. We can hold others responsible for their behavior without necessarily impugning their conscious motivations. And we can hold ourselves more responsible by inspecting our own behavior for its unconscious influences, as unseen as they are unwanted.

  Sexual Selection

  David M. Buss

  Professor of psychology, University of Texas–Austin; author, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating; coauthor (with Cindy M. Meston), Why Women Have Sex

  When most people think about evolution by selection, they conjure up phrases such as “survival of the fittest” or “nature red in tooth and claw.” These focus attention on the Darwinian struggle for survival. Many scientists, but few others, know that evolution by selection occurs through the process of differential reproductive success by virtue of heritable differences in design, not by differential survival success. And differential reproductive success often boils down to differential mating success, the focus of Darwin’s 1871 theory of sexual selection.

  Darwin identified two separate (but potentially related) causal processes by which sexual selection occurs. The first, intrasexual or same-sex competition, involves members of one sex competing with one another in various contests, physical or otherwise, whose winners gain preferential access to mates. Qualities that lead to success evolve; those linked to failure bite the evolutionary dust. Evolution, change over time, occurs as a consequence of the process of intrasexual competition. The second, intersexual selection, deals with preferential mate choice. If members of one sex exhibit a consensus about qualities desired in mates, and those qualities are partially heritable, then those of the opposite sex possessing the desired qualities have a mating advantage. They get preferentially chosen. Those lacking desired mating qualities get shunned, banished, and remain mateless (or must settle for low-quality mates). Evolutionary change over time occurs as a consequence of an increase in frequency of desired traits and a decrease in frequency of disfavored traits.

  Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, controversial in his day and relatively neglected for nearly a century after its publication, has mushroomed into a tremendously important theory in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Research on human mating strategies has exploded over the past decade, as the profound implications of sexual selection become more deeply understood. Adding sexual selection to everybody’s cognitive toolkit will provide profound insights into many human phenomena that otherwise remain baffling. In its modern formulations, sexual-selection theory offers answers to
weighty and troubling questions that still elude many scientists and most nonscientists:

  • Why do male and female minds differ?

  • What explains the rich menu of human mating strategies?

  • Why is conflict between the sexes so pervasive?

  • Why does conflict between women and men focus so heavily on sex?

  • What explains sexual harassment and sexual coercion?

  • Why do men die earlier than women, on average, in every culture around the world?

  • Why are most murderers men?

  • Why are men so much keener than women on forming coalitions for warfare?

  • Why are men so much more prone to becoming suicide terrorists?

  • Why is suicide terrorism so much more prevalent in polygynous cultures that create a greater pool of mateless males?

  Adding sexual-selection theory to everybody’s cognitive toolkit, in short, provides deep insight into the nature of human nature, our obsession with sex and mating, the origins of sex differences, and many of the profound social conflicts that beset us all.

  QED Moments

  Bart Kosko

  Professor of electrical engineering, University of Southern California; author, Noise

  Everyone should know what proof feels like. It reduces all other species of belief to a distant second-class status. Proof is the far end on a cognitive scale of confidence that varies through levels of doubt. And most people never experience it.

  Feeling proof comes from finishing a proof. It does not come from pointing at a proof in a book or in the brain of an instructor. It comes when the prover himself takes the last logical step on the deductive staircase. Then he gets to celebrate that logical feat by declaring “QED” or “Quod erat demonstrandum” or just “Quite easily done.” QED states that he has proved or demonstrated the claim he wanted to prove. The proof need not be original or surprising. It just needs to be logically correct to produce a QED moment. A proof of the Pythagorean theorem has always sufficed.