Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (8 page)

There is a second type of causality detection problem that doesn’t even involve our own behavior. This kind of mental error is extremely widespread and known only among humans. Imagine a situation where a particular outcome is highly desired or strongly feared. Now, further assume that its occurrence is truly beyond our control. A parent sits vigil in a hospital waiting to hear the fate of her injured child. A farmer faces financial ruin if it doesn’t rain. In situations like these, the person begins by exhausting his or her meager behavioral repertoire until it becomes clear that we have no control over the situation.

Or do we? Most people do not deal well with such lack of control. Since direct intervention is not an option, we default to Plan B. This calls for us to presume that, although we ourselves do not have control over the outcome, there is some agent who does. Now if we can just exert some degree of control over the agent, then all is not lost. Perhaps “control” is too strong a word. What usually happens is that the powerless person will attempt to influence the agent through some sort of cajoling or bargaining or social exchange. “Please let my child live. If you do, I promise to be good. I’ll quit smoking. I’ll stop drinking. I’ll start going to church.”
I’ll do something for you if you’ll do this for me.

The farmer facing the loss of his crops? “I’ll sacrifice a goat. I’ll give up something of value if you deliver this desired outcome to me.”
I cannot make it rain, but surely you can.
Causal agents are not unknown in real life, and you’d better maintain a good working relationship with them. Usually, these agents have a knowable agenda. Learn it, and you’re on the road to success. Children learn to please their parents. Workers learn to satisfy their bosses. Spouses learn how to please (or displease) their partners who control resources within a marriage. In all these cases we have accurately detected the power of another in order to retain some control over the world in which we live.

Some baseball players, and perhaps athletes in general, are prone to attributing aspects of their performance to external agencies. “I want to thank the Lord Jesus Christ for letting me hit that home run to win the game in the bottom of the ninth inning.” Such statements, which minimize the player’s responsibility for the accomplishment, sound like the very soul of humility, not to mention piety. However, they are viewed a lot more favorably in positive rather than negative cases. If the batter wants to credit his performance to a deity, that’s his business. The run still counts, as does his team’s victory. However, if the pitcher who gave up that ninth-inning home run shrugs and says, “It was God’s will, don’t blame me,” he may find himself praising the Lord from some minor-league town.

Such superstitious belief systems aren’t confined to players. Most loyal fans I know who watch games on television report that they believe, at some level, that their actions (such as getting up to make a sandwich) have a bearing on the results of the game. It is a rare fan who regularly watches his team, cares passionately about the outcome, and believes, “I’m just a spectator. What I say, think, or do will have no bearing on the results.”

Imagine that your team is winning 3-0 and you walk away to take a phone call or attend to some biological needs. When you return to the game, the other team has tied the score or gone ahead. Even intelligent, rational fans find it difficult not to feel somehow responsible for the sudden reversal of fortune. They may joke about such Caveman Logic, but many take pains to avoid “jinxing” their team in the future.

Here is an even more extreme example of such superstition, reported on the Philadelphia Phillies Internet discussion group in August 2008. In this case, the fan had TiVo’d (recorded) a game previously. When he sat down to watch it, he quickly turned the sound to mute when the home team took a 5-1 lead. He had learned on previous occasions that not doing so could “cost them the game.” As soon as he hit the mute button, he reports, “I realized the absurdity of what I had done. I was watching the recording; the game was already over. Yet I didn’t want to change anything for fear of somehow mystically affecting the outcome of a game that had already been played.”

Causal agents are usually easy to discover—what parent, boss, or spouse keeps herself hidden? In some situations, however, there is little indication that such an agent exists. These are the cases in which our overactive agency detectors spring into action to fill in the blanks. And we don’t just invent causal agents to fill that void; we create powerful, often supernatural, agents who are usually willing to listen. They almost always seem to be within our sphere of influence. Otherwise, what would be the point of creating them?

And so the detection of causality runs the gamut. Sometimes it’s as simple as “I press the lever, I get the food.” However, this causal agency detector—crucial to survival—is probably a bit too highly tuned in most of us. And so, we enter the realm of superstitious behavior. “If I circle to the left and scratch my head, I will get the food.” If I’m in a room full of people who are busy scratching and circling, I’m probably unlikely to discover that the food would have arrived anyway. The bottom line is that we all eat regularly. We survive, we reproduce, and we teach our children to circle and scratch.

Can the human mind simply accept delivery of an important event—be it positive or negative—without seeing it as a
consequence
, either of something we have done, or as the bestowal of an external agent? The realistic answer seems to be, “Not easily.” A friend of mine who managed to get into two road mishaps with deer stood out in the road next to her car the second time, crying, “Why me? What did I do wrong?” She wasn’t talking about her driving. An educated and rational person, she found it difficult not to see the accident as punishment for some misdeed, as if the universe (read, God) were monitoring her every thought and action and doling out consequences.

There is a popular bumper sticker that addresses this problem directly. It says SHIT HAPPENS. Those two words are all but incomprehensible to the majority of people. The sticker does not say I CAUSED SHIT TO HAPPEN. It does not say SHIT WAS DONE TO ME BY A VENGEFUL GOD. It says simply that nonresponse contingent SHIT does happen from time to time. There is no sense looking for what I did to cause it. By excluding any reference to control, that two-word bumper sticker conveys considerable wisdom. But can our cognitive architecture comprehend the message? Again, the most charitable answer is, “Not easily.”

How might such profound distortions around cause and effect have evolved in our ancestors? You’ll recognize this as the same issue we tackled in chapter 1 when we first considered Type I and Type II errors. Here are the key points:

That’s all it takes. And it is reasonable to remind ourselves that errors involving cause and effect do not reflect willful stupidity. They reflect how our minds are predisposed to process information. But more than that, they reflect the fact that there is virtually no incentive to correct these mistakes. Your friends and neighbors also make them.

One more observation: the causal agents most people manufacture are supernatural. They do not correct our errors of attribution by saying, “I do not exist.” Whether spirits, gods, demons, or dead ancestors, these agents operate on us, the living, by controlling the very things we wish we could control. But there’s a catch: we’ve left a very large and embarrassing clue to the fact that these agents are of our own design. Although they are certifiably supernatural, most of them seem to have the same petty agendas and motives as any human in the village or on the street. “You angered me by doing such-and-such, and so I’m going to get you back.” Our gods and demons and ancestor spirits seem not to be very highly evolved entities. In fact, they are as petty and vindictive as any of us. Perhaps this should surprise nobody since, arguably, we created them out of our own limited imaginations.

Psychologists use the term
heuristics
to describe mental shortcuts. Like any shortcut, heuristics can provide great benefits and save lots of time. When they work, it is hard not to admire their elegance. But they do not always work. Often, when they don’t, they look
very
bad. Heuristics and the cognitive architecture that supports them have evolved because
on balance
they provided our ancestors with a reproductive advantage. Those who had them and used them tended to do better than those who did not. Natural selection does not demand perfection or a 100 percent success rate. A small net benefit is enough to entrench a trait in a population. In addition, most heuristics are highly situation specific. They work very well under certain conditions. When those conditions are not exactly met, the same heuristic can be triggered and lead to a lot of trouble. Whether the individual sees the error and adjusts his or her approach or continues to hammer away, producing faulty or even disastrous results in the bargain, is anybody’s guess. Too often, the latter occurs. Such events can reduce individual welfare or compromise the foreign policy of a nation.

Arguably, heuristics are a form of intellectual laziness. The irony is that our species got to be what it is today by being intellectually lazy. We’ve already noted that there is no greater efficiency expert than natural selection. Had our ancestors spent their full intellectual resources on every problem they faced, it would have been a recipe for disaster. The winners in the race to survival and reproduction were the intellectually lazy among us who could fall back on the heuristics they carried.

The range of situations in which these shortcuts are brought into play—not always successfully—is staggering. There is almost no area of human function where we do not call upon a social, intellectual, or perceptual heuristic to do the bulk of our work. Worse yet, we are rarely aware that we are using them, so ingrained are they in how we function. We look at a sea of colors and textures and decide it is a roomful of friends; we hear a sequence of auditory stimuli of particular pitch, phrasing, and timbre and recognize it as a song from our teenage years. We meet a stranger and decide that he or she is someone we would rather avoid than seek further contact with. We shop for a place to live and know instantly that this is The One. In each case we have chosen to devalue or ignore most of the information available to us. Our nervous systems are programmed to zero in on a tiny number of salient features and discount almost everything else.

Heuristics have a checkered history within psychology. Do they represent the best of our minds, maximizing information and minimizing effort, or are they examples of mental sloppiness? If Introductory Psychology textbooks are any indication, the answer is mostly the latter. Virtually every textbook published in the past twenty years contains a section that paints heuristics not as commendable shortcuts, but rather as lamentable laziness. The most commonly criticized examples are called the
availability
heuristic and the
representativeness
heuristic. Both are typically treated with contempt for the errors they lead to when the real world is turned upside down in the unnatural conditions of the psychology lab. Imagine yourself encountering an unkempt individual wearing a tattered and torn jacket and smelling rather ripe. Would you have trouble identifying him as a bank president? You bet you would. Why? Because in your experience bank presidents don’t look (or smell) that way. Is this evidence of defective processing on your part? Yes, according to some, because the dreaded representativeness heuristic has gotten in the way of your ability to gather and evaluate evidence more fully.

I want to be clear that I am not arguing for the abandonment of heuristics. Even if it were possible, it would be ill advised. Gigerenzer and Todd’s book called
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
⁴
is at the forefront of an emerging literature praising that head full of shortcuts. Many readers celebrate the idea that we can be smart and effective without being strictly rational. Gerd Gigerenzer’s book
Gut Feelings
is another example; so is Malcolm Gladwell’s
Blink
. Gladwell introduces the concept of “thin slicing” to describe the cognitive strategy we use to evaluate new information. But he waits seventy-five pages before raising the problems associated with hair-triggered heuristics. Gladwell calls this section “The Dark Side of Thin Slicing.” Caveman Logic is also focused on the “dark side” of heuristics. Although I share Gladwell’s admiration for these mental shortcuts, I worry even more about their inappropriate application. Sometimes they leave us wallowing in ignorance and misinformation. One hundred thousand years ago, knowledge was in shorter supply and there were few ways to validate what we knew. Today, many of our fellow humans still inhabit an uninformed universe of magical thinking. Certainly, religion is born of and nurtured by the very kind of hardwired, uncritical, autopilot circuitry I am criticizing. But the problems are more widespread than religion. Politically correct or not, it’s time to call these beliefs and their consequences into question.

Caveman Logic and prehistoric thinking are not simply written onto the blank-slate minds of uneducated people. It would be a big mistake to view these mental defects as the result of bad information that might have been replaced by alternative facts, if only they had been taught. It was never that simple.