The first time you meet someone, billions of microthoughts ricochet through the chemical and electrical conduits in your cranium. You begin making judgments about the person’s character before you realize it. You may notice a handshake that is strong and vigorous, that the person’s posture is forward and sturdy, that his or her smile is perfect and warm. You take all these features and multiply them by how the person is dressed, divide by the way the person smells, and factor age into a huge equation that forms a first impression in your unconscious. This person is good. Let’s get to know this person.
What if you meet someone who keeps making racist remarks, has a swastika tattooed on one wrist, and smells like mushroom gravy? Before you can turn your emotions into thoughts, you are increasing the distance between you and that person’s funk.
Common sense says first impressions fade as you get to know someone, but first impressions matter more than you realize. Research shows the first impression you have about a person, or anything else, tends to linger. A study in 1997 by Wilkielman, Zajonc, and Shwartz created first impressions in subjects with images of smiles and frowns. The people in the study saw a photo of either a happy or a sad face flash briefly on a screen and then were shown an unfamiliar Chinese character and asked to say whether or not they liked it. People tended to say they liked the characters that followed the smiles over the ones that followed frowns, but later on when they saw the same characters with the expressions preceding them reversed, they didn’t change their answers. Their first impression remained.
You boil down your initial judgment of just about everything in life to “this is good” or “this is bad” and then put the burden of proof on future experience to show you otherwise. You might like someone early on but learn of severe faults over time. You wait for your first impression to be chiseled away instead of promptly changing your opinion of that person’s character. Maybe the person dresses well and waxes poetic on the virtues of good hygiene but gets touchy-feely and hits on every person of the opposite sex who’s around for more than four minutes. Maybe the person beats his or her children but spends weekends at a nursing home teaching the elderly how to use computers. How much evidence would you need to move a new acquaintance from one category to the other?
The affect heuristic is one way you rapidly come to a conclusion about new information. You use it to drop data into two broad categories—good and bad—and then you choose to avoid or seek out what you have judged. The affect heuristic is the Holy Grail of cognitive biases in advertising and politics. When you can associate your product or candidate with positive things or your competitors and opponents with negative things, you win. If you build up enough associations, your product can become eponymous with the category it occupies. Facial tissues become Kleenex. Pain medicine becomes Aspirin. Bandages become Band-Aids.
There is debate among psychologists on just how powerful and trustworthy snap decisions are, but there is no doubt they play a large role in who you are and how you interpret your senses. When first impressions linger and influence how you feel about second, third, and fourth impressions, you are being befuddled by the affect heuristic.
Much of the machinery of the mind takes place behind closed doors in corridors of the unconscious, and these ruminations are part of a give-and-take with the conscious mind. Psychologists sometimes divide the mind into parts that correspond with the evolution of the brain. This is an oversimplification, but it is useful to see in the various parts the story of how your brain evolved from the simple versions carried around by insects and fish. It helps to make sense of how the mind is formed if you see the brain layered like an archaeological dig that is stratified with the oldest artifacts underneath the more recent. The oldest parts lie mostly in the hind-brain. These structures, among others, are concerned with your survival and help regulate all those things you don’t have to think about, like breathing and balancing on one foot. The mid-brain structures were shaped by your primate ancestors and grant you emotions and social awareness. The top layer, the most recently evolved, reasons and calculates. The frontal lobes and neocortex act as executive offices of the mind, taking suggestions from all other structures and formulating plans of action.
Your rational, mathematical, reasonable, and methodical mind is slow and plodding. It takes notes and uses tools. Your irrational, emotional, instinctive mind is lightning-fast. When you decide to change your own oil, or install a new dishwasher, you depend on processing, on instructions and measurements, but less on emotions. You depend on snap judgments, on feelings that can’t be described with equations, when you decide where to go to lunch or what movie to rent. The conscious mind is still making choices, but the unconscious mind is providing feelings and influence. A great deal of your life is contemplated by the emotional brain, which means in social situations and matters of life and death your thoughts and behaviors are inspired by automatic and unconscious triggers, suggestions from a shadowy place that is difficult to access and explain. There are many books on the topic, but for our purposes just keep in mind how powerful an influence your mood is on the decision-making regions of your mind. You can see the mind as divided into automatic, emotional, and rational spheres of thought. Let’s reduce this to two, the conscious you and the unconscious you.
Unconscious-you has a lot in common with mice. A mouse eats about 15 percent of its body weight in food every day. A 180-pound man would have to eat more than a pound of food an hour to match such a cranked-up metabolism. These tiny, frenetic creatures are curious but cautious, and like any animal in the wild, mice base most of their behavior on the tug-of-war between risk and reward. Since a mouse needs to eat all the time, it is constantly faced with situations where it must weigh the danger of foraging against its hunger for calories. The mouse has a primitive brain, so it can’t base its choices on reason, on a careful analysis of economic benefits versus systemic losses. It feels its way through life with the rodent equivalent of intuition. When it faces a novel situation, it decides whether or not to proceed without using the same kind of logic you are able to summon. Otherwise, mousetraps would be useless. Go back far enough and you share a common ancestor with the mouse, and those unconscious abilities to recognize risk and reward evolved into the versions you and the mouse both still use. The recognition of risk isn’t something you determine with imaginary spreadsheets and slide rules of the mind. While blueprints and diagrams require careful planning, identifying risk comes from the gut, or, more accurately, it comes from the emotion-generating structures in your brain. A simple assessment of a situation as either good or bad kept your ancestors out of the mouths of predators and away from the business end of a spear most of the time, but when the problem is too complicated—like a mousetrap to a foraging rodent—you can really screw things up.
When you return to a place where snakes slither underfoot and food grows on bushes, your attention collapses to what is within reach. Your risk instincts serve you well when you are back in the same conditions your brain was evolved to deal with, like if you’re lost in the woods while hiking or hunting. In any circumstance where the only concerns are those of immediate risk and reward, the software handed down through your genes can get you pretty far. Fast-forward to typical human life today, and now your ancient mind must deal with a world mostly out of reach. Loans and retirement plans, heart disease and elections are far less tangible than the growling of your belly and the creatures that slink through the night. Your risk-avoidance systems are great when the situation is concrete but are pretty crappy when dealing with abstraction.
Antoine Becharo and Hanna Demasio in 1997 published a study in the journal Science that is often cited as a great demonstration of the unconscious you. They hypothesized your reasoning “is preceded by a nonconscious biasing step that uses neural systems other than those that support declarative knowledge.” In other words, you are problem-solving before you are aware of it.
In the study, participants played a card game without any idea of what the
rules were. They knew only they would earn money when they won and lose money when they lost. To play, they drew cards one at a time off the top of four separate decks until the psychologists said they were finished. The first two decks paid handsomely but were loaded with losing cards that took a lot of money away from the subjects. The other two decks paid meagerly, but the losing card’s fees were small. Over time, the people playing would shift from the high-reward but high-risk decks to the low-reward, low-risk ones. The powers of pattern recognition shaped their behavior toward the best choices without their knowing exactly what they were doing. As fascinating as this is, the study goes further. The participants were hooked up to sensors that measured the moisture levels of their skin, a facet of the human body automatically and unconsciously mind-controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. Those levels began to spike as the people reached for the high-risk decks well before they stopped picking those cards. The unconscious was noticing the risks and placing warnings in the suggestion box about how to proceed long before the decision-making conscious mind was able to act. Questioned later, about a third of the subjects were unable to explain why they decided to stick to the safe cards.
Decisions about risk and reward begin with the unconscious you. Unconscious-you notices things are either bad or good, dangerous or safe, before conscious-you can put those feelings into words. Good things reward you, bad things harm you. When you are determining if something is good, you are saying it is worth the risk of obtaining it. Would you sleep overnight with a poisonous snake loose in your apartment? The risk of being bitten in your sleep greatly outweighs the reward of sleeping in your own bed, so probably not. Would you fly to Las Vegas for a vacation? The risk of dying in a plane crash is worth the reward of seeing Penn & Teller and gambling in the desert, so you buy a ticket and deal with the turbulence.
These calculations aren’t done on a blackboard in your mind; they are derived from consultation with gut feelings, emotional twinges rising like the tips of icebergs from the inky depths of your unconscious. Your species, all species, have been making decisions from the gut for far longer than from careful contemplation, so the influence of these mental machinations is great.
In 1982, a patient known to neuroscience as Elliot developed a brain tumor in his orbitofrontal cortex. Although it wrecked his life, it gave to science an unprecedented look into how important emotion is to decision making. Before the tumor, Elliot was a successful accountant with a home, a wife, and savings in the bank. After the tumor, he became unable to make snap decisions and would instead become transfixed when asked to choose something as simple as which shirt to wear in the morning. His emotional brain became unable to communicate with his rational brain after his tumor was removed. When researchers hooked him up to the same sort of skin conductance measurement devices used in the card game stud, he registered no emotional response to photos of mangled bodies or other images normal people instantly recoil from. To him, the images were neither good nor bad. He became a being of pure rational thought, seeing every bit of information flowing into his mind with cold logic. Elliot could no longer make simple choices because he had no emotions. If he had to pick something to eat from a menu, he would endlessly pore over all the variables as if the secrets of the universe were unfolding before him. Texture, size, shape, calories, flavor, the history of his diet, the price—all of these variables and hundreds more would be subdivided into more variables and then weighed against one another in an endless cycle of computation. Without emotion, it became incredibly difficult to settle on any one option. He became a robot without hate, love, or yearning. He eventually divorced, lost his job, money, house, and everything else from his former life except the love of his parents, who took him in.
The affect heuristic, therefore, is often a good thing. You need it to see danger and pick a place to eat after a concert. The problems arise when you must evaluate large numbers or percentages, when you must see connections and abstractions. This is why politicians who bring out charts and graphs tend to fail, and those who use anecdotes tend to win. Stories make sense on an emotional level, so anything that conjures fear, empathy, or pride will trump confusing statistics. It causes you to buy a security system for your house but neglect to purchase radon detectors. It makes you carry pepper spray while you clog your arteries with burritos. It installs metal detectors in schools but leaves french fries on the menu. It creates vegetarian smokers. Well-known, primal dangers are easy to see, easy to guard against, even when greater dangers loom. The affect heuristic speaks to your basic sensibilities about risk and reward while neglecting the big picture and the dangers of complex systems that require study and deeper understanding.
In 2000, Melissa L. Funicane, Ali Alhakami, Paul Slovic, and Stephen M. Johnson had subjects rate both how risky and how beneficial they felt natural gas, food preservatives, and nuclear power plants were on a scale of one to ten. The subjects were divided into groups where some people read only about the risks while others read about the benefits, and then each had to come up with revised ratings. As you might expect, people who read about the benefits later rated the technologies as being even more beneficial to society than they did at first. The weird part? They rated the risks as being lower. The gap widened. The same was true for the other group who rated the dangers as being more risky than they had in the first questionnaire and the benefits as less appealing. They were even more likely to widen the gap when given a short time limit to give an answer. Logically, risks and benefits are two different things and must be judged separately, but you don’t judge things logically. The more something seems to benefit you, the less risky it seems overall. When you see something as good, the bad qualities are played down. When you see something as risky, the harder it becomes to notice the benefits. The affect heuristic is stronger still when something is familiar or speaks to the primal brain.
The feeling you get in your gut telling you yes or no, good or bad is greatly influenced by the affect heuristic. Keep this in mind when you notice fearful language and imagery coming from any source with an agenda. Remember your tendency to rush to judgment and stick with first impressions when someone is obviously playing up the positive side of an issue or begins to use euphemistic language. You are always looking for risks and rewards, but when you want to believe something is good you will unconsciously turn down the volume on the bad qualities, and vice versa. Any familiar danger will overshadow new threats, and first impressions are difficult to change.
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Dunbar’s Number
THE MISCONCEPTION: There is a Rolodex in your mind with the names and faces of everyone you’ve ever known.
THE TRUTH: You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.
Think of a cup completely filled with water. You try to add one drop to this cup, and one drop spills out. You try to pour a cup of water into it, and a cup of water spills out. This is called a zero-sum system. To add anything to it you must remove an equal proportion.
The bank of names and faces and relationships in your mind, the one you use to keep up with who is a friend, who is a foe, and who is a potential mate—this bank is a zero-sum system too. The reason for this doesn’t really have to do with how much space you have to keep the information, it has to do with how much energy you have on tap to devote to worrying about your place in your social world.
In other primates, social relationships are maintained by grooming—picking bugs off of one another. You don’t go to a Mad Men party and dig around in your friend’s hair while watching the show. But getting together for any reason is still a grooming behavior. You hang out, work on projects, and talk on the phone to keep connected. Visiting friends just to shoot the shit is the human equivalent of picking ticks off of one another’s backs. As technology has allowed you to be farther and farther apart yet still keep in touch with loved ones, your grooming behavior has remained constant. In fact, most of your innate gregariousness works as it always has by adapting to t
he norms of the era. In modern life, human relationships are no longer separated geographically. You can probably start with any one person alive and play six degrees of separation to get to any other person. Modern humans are deeply interconnected.
But you can’t keep up with all those people and their connections, not in a real social way—you are not so smart. The truth is, out of this cluster of humans you can reliably manage to keep up with only around 150 people. More specifically, it’s between 150 and 230. Giant cities full of other humans, Internet social networks with hundreds of people sharing status updates, corporations with branches around the world—your brain is incapable of handling the multitude of human contacts populating these examples. All those personalities and quirks, the history of your interactions with each, it becomes a giant file of social information that takes constant maintenance. Psychology has shown us the brain is not like a hard drive, so the problem with too many relationships isn’t a space issue. The problem is more about the economic limits of your mental human relations department.
Why is this?
The neocortex of primates is the part of the brain responsible for keeping up with others. We can’t be certain of what forces shaped the size of this part of the brain, but for each primate the size of the cortex correlates with the size of the average social group. Apes live in small groups; humans live in big ones. Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist who first presented this concept, figures the size of the average group is directly correlated with how efficiently the members can socially groom one another. Dunbar says that efficiency is predicted by how large the primate’s neocortex is. According to Dunbar, the larger the group, the more time must be spent by each member to maintain social cohesion. Each person must do some grooming with each other person and then also keep up with who is friends with whom, who has a beef, and what each other’s relative status is compared to his or hers and others’. The complexity builds exponentially with each new member. If someone you know moves away, you start to groom that person less and less, until you start to touch base once a year, or maybe lose touch for years. It takes far more effort to stay connected once a friend escapes your direct contact. That effort takes away from the time you can spend with other friends. Your brain was shaped in a world where this time also took away from other efforts—like hunting, gathering, and building shelter. There is a maximum amount of time and effort you can spend—it is a zero-sum system.
You Are Not So Smart Page 13