With Venezuela in chaos, and with the
recent calls for Jeremy Corbyn to publically apologise for his insanely short-sighted
endorsement of Hugo Chavez, it would seem like an obvious thing for Corbyn to
admit he’s been a fool and repudiate his former beliefs. But of course, we know
that’s not going to happen: there is about as much chance of that happening as
there is of Diane Abbott being asked to present the numbers round on Countdown.
This is, of course, one of the age-old
puzzles of humanity - why human beings are so terribly beset by confirmation
bias (the tendency to embrace information that supports your beliefs and reject
information that contradicts them) and so intransigently irrational even when
presented with good reasons that they are wrong about things. I’ve thought
about this in the past, and I think the reason is twofold.
The first reason is that our biological
evolution has resulted in our being very flawed creatures. Our evolutionary
legacies are seen broadly across our behaviour, because they are vestiges of
our past. The evolution of the eye has left us with a large blind area in the
middle of the retina. Our prurience is the result of our sexual past. Our long spine and susceptibility to back
pains and injuries are the result of our quadruped ancestry. Our wisdom teeth
are a result of our once having bigger jaws.
Plus our fear of the dark, our
blushing, our sneezing, our hairs standing up, our goose bumps, our reactions
to moving objects, our trepidation at wild animals, and our behavioural
similarities with other primates closest to us in origin, all of these show
that we are a medley of inherited ineptitudes, built for the Savannah.
The second reason is that our cognition
is an evolved phenomenon just like all our other evolved traits, and the kind of
reasoning (or lack of) we are complaining about when Corbyn won’t change his
mind about Venezuelan socialism is not the kind of cognition that we’ve
optimally evolved.
Our biggest selection pressures on
survival were much more about group symbiosis and cooperation than trying to
solve lateral and complex problems. Things like confirmation bias and other
general irrationalities are probably bootstrapped by powerful underlying
survival legacies that stretch out across our evolutionary past.
Consequently, although this might seem
counterintuitive at first, it’s probably largely true that the kind of habits
of human thinking that best helped us survive in tribes with an in-group
mentality are also the kind of habits that don’t serve us well when it comes to
abstract reasoning and intellectual discourse. To be smart you have to unlearn
as well as learn.
One would think that in an evolutionary
game of survival, mistaken thoughts would disadvantage us - after all, failure
to process facts and truths accurately can cost you your life if a predator is
lurking. But maybe that is to uncover the answer - our evolution has primed us
for over-simplistic analyses precisely because our brains are designed by
natural selection to form patterns of causality that once upon a time aided us
in survival.
This has been demonstrated in studies
of brain states, where neurological analyses have shown how our brains naturally
become excited when they interface with patterns, harmony, beauty, and symmetry
- it seems we are primed to place a higher qualitative value on pattern over
non-pattern and beauty over ugliness.
But there is a price to pay. Suppose
you're a distant ancestor still making sense of the world - you will gain by
false positives, but you are liable to lose a lot if you get it wrong. A
rustling in the bushes may be the wind, but it may be a predator. It's more
costly to assume it's a predator and find out it's the wind than to assume it's
the wind and find out it's a predator.
So over the years we have been primed
for false positives - to sense potential danger, patterns and breaks from
normalcy, and ascribe them to something causal or deliberate or predatory, even
when such things are not there.
As well as that, it has been useful for
us to evolve mechanisms for thinking simplistically. Intellection has served us
well in rising to great heights as a species, but thinking simplistically means
humans too fondly look to pigeon-hole things into black and white, with a
primary focus on right or wrong and true or false, without understanding or
considering the complex areas of grey in between.
When you combine that with the
aforementioned tendency to see patterns when none are there, and the tendency
for tribalism and in-group mentality, you can see how susceptible humans are to
falling into bad thinking habits.
Once you combine all that with two
other effects; the Dunning-Kruger effect (overestimating your own competence in
reasoning) and the illusion of explanatory depth (believing you know more of
the complex, finer details of a situation than you actually do) it is fairly
easy to see why humans are constantly getting so much wrong, and why even when
presented with good reason to change their mind, it’s quite unlikely that they
will.
