Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (7 page)

There are several ways that your mind, an otherwise marvelous piece of engineering, can go wrong. To keep this simple, we’ll consider only two broad categories. The first stems from the kind of information that was either scarce or absent altogether when our minds evolved. For example, many people acknowledge serious problems in grasping information about quantities. Remember, we’re a species who spent a lot of time with number systems no more sophisticated than “1, 2, 3, many.” Probabilities are even tougher for many people to handle. Not surprisingly, this kind of information is “evolutionarily novel,” or at least recent enough so that it is unlikely we have evolved any modular systems to deal directly with it. Any success we have will involve pressing some related modules into service. They’ll do all they can to help, but they may fall well short of the task. Before you ask, this is
not
like asking the spleen to fill in for the heart while the latter is momentarily off-line. These are all mental modules, any number of which may be activated by a particular stimulus. Normally, there is some kind of mental
triage
that determines whose job it is to respond, namely, which module is the best fit for the task. In cases where no module really fits the bill (e.g., balancing a checkbook), our mind is likely to use a second-best approach that, for some of us, is not very good at all.

The second kind of mental shortcoming that we humans commonly encounter involves the hair-trigger response of a module that might have served us better if it had remained inactivated. We will examine these cases in great detail later, although the general principle is important to grasp early on. The inappropriate activation of a specialized mental module can be just as problematic as its failure to operate. This point is central to the logic of this book. It is also very easy to overlook, especially when most people share the same inappropriately triggered mental software.

Two of the most egregious examples of overactivation of otherwise useful mental modules involve
detection of pattern
and
detection of causality
. As you’ll see, both of these mental errors lead to belief systems and elaborate behavioral outputs that, in one sense, define our species, but also waste a lot of its time. It is hard for many people to view such mental errors as errors because there is such elaborate and widespread social support for them. And, like much delusional thinking, there is often some secondary gain. This means that such beliefs may be dead wrong, but there are benefits that come from holding them.

It’s hard to imagine a time or place when it wasn’t beneficial to have control over the important events—both good and bad—in our lives. We are all hedonists. Like every other animal on the planet, humans share the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. If it’s good, you don’t just want it happening to you, you want to be able to
make
it happen.

The same applies to bad things. The world is full of unpleasant events, some physical and some psychological. People seek control over the bad things that swirl around them. Behaviors that lead to the reduction or elimination of bad things are quickly learned and remain in our repertoires. This is what psychologists call
negative reinforcement
. We are also quick to learn which behaviors produce unpleasant or painful consequences. Unless we are fools or masochists, those behaviors tend to be suppressed. This is called
punishment
by psychologist and layman alike. The good thing about punishment is that one can simply avoid it by withholding the behavior that produces it. Punishment doesn’t just happen to you; it’s under your control.

Our ancestors would have learned that not all events, either positive or negative, are directly under our control. Sometimes someone else, maybe a group member or a group leader, is in control of whether or not a desired event occurs. There is widespread belief that good things don’t just come from nowhere and drop into our laps. That’s certainly a sentiment I’ve heard expressed from family and friends, not to mention songwriters, movie characters, and complete strangers. The idea runs very deep in human nature. If something good has happened to you, it has probably happened for a reason.

Those are not altogether unreasonable beliefs for a social being—or at least the descendant of social beings. We are, of course, the most social primates who have ever walked the earth. The result of all this social living and breeding is that we are likely to view events within the context of our social existence.

There would be a premium on being able to detect such causal agents, and a special benefit for having the social skills to influence the person in control, whoever he was. Imagine that food resources were scarce and their distribution was controlled by Thog, the group leader. It would behoove you to establish a strong relationship with Thog and, in the process, learn what kinds of entreaties and bargains pleased him. Similarly, if Thog had the power to undermine your efforts, perhaps cause harm to your family or crops, you would learn what kind of social exchange might deter him from visiting such events on you. What does Thog want of me? Everyone has an agenda. What does Thog want in exchange for keeping me from harm, or reducing the severity of the troubles he has brought to me?

Moreover, we cannot imagine withholding thanks when we get what we want, whatever it is. Maybe it was winning the lottery or learning that our loved ones are alive and well, after we had reason to fear the worst. Thanks to whom? Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to matter very much. This is what social living means. Somebody is usually in power and that means somebody was responsible for what we’ve received. Social exchange simply requires that we offer a “Thank you.” Remember, good things don’t just happen. The alternative to a simple “Thank you” is to appear ungrateful, and perhaps anger the source of the gift or, worse yet, risk having the gift withdrawn. That’s too big a chance to take, especially if we can avoid problems simply by saying “Thank you.”

A friend of mine, whom I would hardly describe as religious, shared this story with me. His wife developed some physical symptoms that were as puzzling as they were painful. When it became apparent that some of the possible diagnoses were potentially life threatening, she went into the hospital for a series of tests. Both my friend and his wife were understandably anxious and waited helplessly for the verdict. After a period of time, the results came back: she was OK. The condition was treatable. The illness was not life threatening. They were immensely relieved. My friend left her room and walked downstairs to the chapel. He went to the back of the room where a guestbook encouraged visitors to leave a brief message. He wrote, “Thank you,” and left.

He did not write “Thank you, God.” He did not pray. He simply, as he put it to me, felt an irresistible urge to say “Thank you.” Whether to God, the doctors, the nurse’s aide—it didn’t seem to matter. A gift had been received and some circuitry had been triggered in him. The only logical endpoint was the utterance of “Thank you.” Social exchange in action: You give. I receive. I thank. Anything less would be a violation of something very fundamental about human nature.

The oddity here, of course, is that my friend was able to observe and later discuss his own behavior. He engaged in what psychologists call
metacognition
. Thoughts about thoughts. His actions struck him as somewhat odd. He reported them to his wife and was willing to discuss them with me. Most people don’t go this far. There are so many rituals to normalize “Thank you” that their occurrence doesn’t require comment or analysis: “Thank God that my wife will live.” “Amen!” Those “Amens” come from others who share our cognitive architecture. They feel the same urge to give thanks when something good has happened. There must be a causal agent and somebody had better damn well thank him.

Social exchange is embodied so deeply in our thinking and so subtly in our everyday language that many of us are unaware of the beliefs we are expressing. When good things over which we have little control do occur, our statements convey not only our pleasure but also some form of thanks. That “Thank you” can either be nonspecific, as in the case of my friend’s written words, or directed to some imagined causal agent. Note that the circumstances triggering the need for such social exchange can be far less than life threatening. We can shift the venue from the hospital to the sports bar, and little changes.

Imagine two friends discussing the results of a baseball game in which the home team held on to preserve a small lead:

“Thank God they won!” or “Thank heavens they won!” Sometimes shortened to, “Thankfully, they won!”

But why
thankful
? And thankful to whom? Who is this agent or baseball god who delivers victories? Why isn’t it sufficient to say, “I am glad that we won” and be done with it? It’s telling just how rare such a reaction is, both in hospitals and in sports bars.

Sensitivity to causal relationships is high on the list of what a species needs to survive on this planet. Psychologist Henry Plotkin put it elegantly when he argued, “Our literal survival depends on a finely tuned knowledge of the causal texture of the world.” This is hardly a new insight. Eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume wrote about what might be termed a psychological compulsion to search out and believe in causal relations. Although it lies beyond Hume’s scope of interest, this “compulsion” is hardly unique to humans. In Plotkin’s words, “Illusions of causality can be induced in exactly the same way in both humans and rats.”
¹

There are actually two types of causal detection errors. One of them involves our own actions. We wrongly believe that some behavior of ours is responsible for a particular environmental occurrence. Humans make these errors of attribution all the time and we are hardly alone in doing so. In 1948, psychologist B. F. Skinner published a now-famous demonstration with pigeons showing that the periodic
nonresponse contingent
delivery of food—in other words, food that occurred independently of what the pigeons did—resulted in repeated, stereotyped patterns of behavior.
²
No two birds did exactly the same thing. Some turned to the left, others to the right; some paced to the rear of the chamber, some bobbed their heads repeatedly. Normally pigeons labor away in Skinner boxes, pecking a response key in order to remain well fed. This behavior truly produces food rewards and the animals have no trouble learning what is required of them. But here there
was
no requirement. The pigeons could do anything or nothing and they would still be fed. And yet, not one of them got the message. None of them chose to do nothing. Every pigeon tested under these conditions came up with some behavioral pattern, as if to say, “I’ve figured it out! I know what I have to do.” It’s as if the possibility of
not
being in control of their world never occurs to them. People often laugh at the lowly pigeon’s mental mistakes. We scoff at their lack of understanding of the world around them. Sadly, as many psychologists have observed, humans behave almost identically under these same conditions.

Skinner described his results as “superstitious behavior,” an odd term to describe the behavior of pigeons. He suggested that, like humans, pigeons were not very good at distinguishing those events they had caused to happen from those that had nothing to do with them or their actions. In 1972, my colleague James Hubbard and I published a similar demonstration involving rats.
³
They were every bit as superstitious as pigeons, showing a nearly comic range of behavior patterns that had been adventitiously reinforced by regular food deliveries. Superstitious behavior in lab animals has become a staple of undergraduate psychology education in “learning laboratory” courses, as well as demonstrations of operant conditioning during community open-house events.

Rats, pigeons, and people are all prone to overestimating the connections between their own behavior and things that happen to them. In all cases, it appears that natural selection has favored a “causality detection” module that overinterprets minimal evidence. If that module is going to make a mistake, it’s probably better to
see
causality where it doesn’t exist than to miss a case where it really does.

Most of us are familiar with the Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Although its origins are somewhat cloudy—some credit it to the ancient Greeks, others to Saint Francis—this brief approach to achieving peace of mind contains considerable wisdom. A deeper look at AA doctrine will get you enmeshed in references to a “Higher Power” or other borderline spirituality, but this simple prayer (minus its entreaty to God, which I have pointedly deleted) might as well be a mantra for this book:

Admittedly, AA seems an unlikely place to look for agreement with the theme of this book, and many AA members may be unhappy at seeing their serenity prayer co-opted for the present purpose. But good ideas are good ideas, and this particular one is central to our book: “Stop trying to change or control what isn’t under your control.” The prayer explicitly notes that there are some things that are not controllable and it encourages you to work very hard to learn the difference.

Most of us don’t do a good job at making this distinction. We have mental modules devoted solely to detecting cause-effect relationships. These modules are in place nearly from infancy and are prone to erring in the direction of overestimating our degree of control. Like a rat in a Skinner box, we talk ourselves into believing that all those events are tied directly to what we do. “I’ll wear my lucky shirt to the softball game,” or “I won’t change my socks as long as my team keeps winning.” If pressed, most people will tell you it’s “just in fun,” but for many of us, that kind of fun comes from a pretty deep place.