Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

for discovering and encoding Truth with a capital T, our human capacity for belief is haphazard, scarred by evolution and contaminated by emotions, moods, desires, goals, and simple self-interest — and surprisingly vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of memory. Moreover, evolution has left us distinctly gullible, which smacks more of evolutionary shortcut than good engineering. All told, though the systems that underlie our capacity for belief are powerful, they are also subject to superstition, manipulation, and fallacy. This is not trivial stuff: beliefs, and the imperfect neural tools we use to evaluate them, can lead to family conflicts, religious disputes, and even war.

In principle, an organism that trafficked in beliefs ought to have a firm grasp on the origins of its beliefs and how strongly the evidence supports them. Does my belief that Colgate is a good brand of toothpaste derive from (1) my analysis of a double-blind test conducted and published by Consumer Reports, (2) my enjoyment of Colgate’s commercials, or (3) my own comparisons of Colgate against the other “leading brands”? I should be able to tell you, but I can’t.

Because evolution built belief mainly out of off-the-shelf components that evolved for other purposes, we often lose track of where our beliefs come from — if we ever knew — and even worse, we are often completely unaware of how much we are influenced by irrelevant information.

Take, for example, the fact that students rate better-looking professors as teaching better classes. If we have positive feelings toward a given person in one respect, we tend to automatically generalize that positive regard to other traits, an illustration of what is known in psychology as the “halo effect.” The opposite applies too: see one negative characteristic, and you expect all of an individual’s traits to be negative, a sort of “pitchfork effect.” Take, for example, the truly sad study in which people were shown pictures of one of two children, one more attractive, the other less so. The subjects were then told that the child, let’s call him Junior, had just thrown a snowball, with a rock inside it, at another child; the test subjects then were asked to interpret the boy’s behavior. People who saw the unattractive picture characterized Junior as a thug, perhaps headed to reform school; those shown the more attractive picture delivered judgments that were rather more mild, suggesting, for example, that Junior was merely “having a bad day.” Study after study has shown that attractive people get better breaks in job interviews, promotions, admissions interviews, and so on, each one an illustration of how aesthetics creates noise in the channel of belief.

In the same vein, we are more likely to vote for candidates who (physically) “look more competent” than the others. And, as advertisers know all too well, we are more likely to buy a particular brand of beer if we see an attractive person drinking it, more likely to want a pair of sneakers if we see a successful athlete like Michael Jordan wearing them. And though it may be irrational for a bunch of teenagers to buy a particular brand of sneakers so they can “be like Mike,” the halo effect, ironically, makes it entirely rational for Nike to spend millions of dollars to secure His Airness’s endorsement. And, in a particularly shocking recent study, children of ages three to five gave have higher ratings to foods like carrots, milk, and apple juice if they came in McDonald’s packaging. Books and covers, carrots and Styrofoam packaging. We are born to be suckered.

The halo effect (and its devilish opposite) is really just a special case of a more general phenomenon: just about anything that hangs around in our mind, even a stray word or two, can influence how we perceive the world and what we believe. Take, for example, what happens if I ask you to memorize this list of words: furniture, self-confident, corner, adventuresome, chair, table, independent, and television. (Got that? What follows is more fun if you really do try to memorize the list.)

Now read the following sketch, about a man named Donald:

Donald spent a great amount of his time in search of what he liked to call excitement. He had already climbed Mt. McKinley, shot the Colorado rapids in a kayak, driven in a demolition derby, and piloted a jet-powered boat — without knowing very much about boats. He had risked injury, and even death, a number of times. Now he was in search of new excitement. He was thinking, perhaps, he would do some skydiving or maybe cross the Atlantic in a sailboat.

To test your comprehension, I ask you to sum up Donald in a single word. And the word that pops into your mind is… (see the footnote).[14] Had you memorized a slightly different list, say, furniture, conceited, corner, reckless, chair, table, aloof television, the first word that would have come to mind would likely be different — not adventuresome, but reckless. Donald may perfectly well be both reckless and adventuresome, but the connotations of each word are very different — and people tend to pick a characterization that relates to what was already on their mind (in this case, slyly implanted by the memory list). Which is to say that your impression of Donald is swayed by a bit of information (the words in the memory list) that ought to be entirely irrelevant.

Another phenomenon, called the “focusing illusion,” shows how easy it is to manipulate people simply by directing their attention to one bit of information or another. In one simple but telling study, college students were asked to answer two questions: “How happy are you with your life in general?” and “How many dates did you have last month?” One group heard the questions in exactly that order, while another heard them in the opposite order, second question first. In the group that heard the question about happiness first, there was almost no correlation between the people’s answers; some people who had few dates reported that they were happy, some people with many dates reported that they were sad, and so forth. Flipping the order of the questions, however, put people’s focus squarely on romance; suddenly, they could not see their happiness as independent of their love life. People with lots of dates saw themselves as happy, people with few dates viewed themselves as sad. Period. People’s judgments in the dates-first condition (but not in the happiness-first condition) were strongly correlated with the number of dates they’d had. This may not surprise you, but it ought to, because it highlights just how malleable our beliefs really are. Even our own internal sense of self can be influenced by what we happen to focus on at a given moment.

The bottom line is that every belief passes through the unpredictable filter of contextual memory. Either we directly recall a belief that we formed earlier, or we calculate what we believe based on whatever memories we happen to bring to mind.

Yet few people realize the extent to which beliefs can be contaminated by vagaries of memory. Take the students who heard the dating question first. They presumably thought that they were answering the happiness question as objectively as they could; only an exceptionally self-aware undergraduate would realize that the answer to the second question might be biased by the answer to the first. Which is precisely what makes mental contamination so insidious. Our subjective impression that we are being objective rarely matches the objective reality: no matter how hard we try to be objective, human beliefs, because they are mediated by memory, are inevitably swayed by minutiae that we are only dimly aware of.

From an engineering standpoint, humans would presumably be far better off if evolution had supplemented our contextually driven memory with a way of systematically searching our inventory of memories. Just as a pollster’s data are most accurate if taken from a representative cross section of a population, a human’s beliefs would be soundest if they were based on a balanced set of evidence. But alas, evolution never discovered the statistician’s notion of an unbiased sample.

Instead, we routinely take whatever memories are most recent or most easily remembered to be much more important than any other data. Consider, for example, an experience I had recently, driving across country and wondering at what time I’d arrive at the next motel. When traffic was moving well, I’d think to myself, “Wow, I’m driving at 80 miles per hour on the interstate; I’ll be there in an hour.” When traffic slowed due to construction, I’d say, “Oh no, it’ll take me two hours.” What I was almost comically unable to do was to take an average across two data points at the same time, and say, “Sometimes the traffic moves well, sometimes it moves poorly. I anticipate a mixture of good and bad, so I bet it will take an hour and a half.”

Some of the world’s most mundane but common interpersonal friction flows directly from the same failure to reflect on how well our samples represent reality. When we squabble with our spouse or our roommate about whose turn it is to wash the dishes, we probably (without realizing it) are better able to remember the previous times when we, ourself, took care of them (as compared to the times when our roommate or spouse did); after all, our memory is organized to focus primarily on our own experience. And we rarely compensate for that imbalance — so we come to believe we’ve done more work overall and perhaps end up in a self-righteous huff. Studies show that in virtually any collaborative enterprise, from taking care of a household to writing academic papers with colleagues, the sum of each individual’s perceived contribution exceeds the total amount of work done. We cannot remember