Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

zero.

Perhaps it is only a myth that Menelaus declared war on the Trojans after Paris abducted the woman Menelaus loved, but there can be little doubt that some of the most significant decisions in history have been made for reasons more emotional than rational. This may well, for example, have been the case in the 2003 invasion of Iraq; only a few months earlier, President Bush was quoted as saying, in reference to Saddam Hussein, 'After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.' Emotion almost certainly plays a role when certain individuals decide to murder their spouse, especially one caught in flagrante delicto. Positive emotions, of course, influence many decisions too — the houses people buy, the partners they marry, the sometimes dubious individuals with whom they have short- term flings. As my father likes to say, 'All sales' — and indeed all choices

— 'are emotional.' From the perspective developed in this book, what is klugey is not so much the fact that people sometimes rely on emotions but rather the way those emotions interact with the deliberative system. This is true not just in the obvious scenarios I mentioned — those involving jealousy, love, vengeance, and so forth — but even in cases that don't appear to engage our emotions at all. Consider, for exam

ple, a study that asked people how much they would contribute toward various environmental programs, such as saving dolphins or providing free medical checkups to farm workers in order to reduce the incidence of skin cancer. When asked which effort they thought was more important, most people point to the farm workers (perhaps because they valued human lives more than those of dolphins). But when researchers asked people how much money they would donate to each cause, dolphins and farm workers, they gave more to the cuddly dolphins. Either choice on its own might make sense, but making the two together is as inconsistent as you can get. Why would someone spend more money on dolphins if that person thinks that human lives are more important? It's one thing for our deliberative system to be out of sync with the ancestral system, another for the two to flip-flop arbitrarily in their bid for control.

In another recent study, people were shown a face — happy, sad, or neutral — for about a sixtieth of a second — and then were asked to drink a 'novel lemon-lime beverage.' People drank more lemon-lime after seeing happy faces than after viewing sad ones, and they were willing to pay twice as much for the privilege. All this presumably shows that the process of priming affects our choices just as much as our beliefs: a happy face primes us to approach the drink as if it were pleasant, and a sad face primes us to avoid the drink (as if it were unpleasant). Is it any wonder that advertisers almost always present us with what the rock band REM once called 'shiny, happy people'?

An even more disquieting study asked a group of subjects to play a game known as 'prisoner's dilemma,' which requires pairs of people to choose to either cooperate with each other or 'defect' (act uncooperatively). You get the bigger payoff if you and the other person both cooperate (say, $10), an intermediate reward (say, $3) if you defect and your opponent cooperates, and no reward if you both defect. The general procedure is a staple in psychology research; the catch in this particular study was that before people began to play the game, they sat in a waiting room where an ostensibly unrelated news broadcast was playing in the background. Some subjects heard prosocial news (about a clergyman donating a kidney to a needy patient); others, by contrast, heard a broadcast about a clergyman committing murder. What happened? You guessed it: people who heard about the good clergyman were a lot more cooperative than those who heard about the bad clergyman.

In all these studies, emotions of one sort or another prime memories, and those memories in turn shape choice. A different sort of illustration comes from what economist George Loewenstein calls 'the attraction of the visceral.' It's one thing to turn down chocolate cheesecake in the abstract, another when the waiter brings in the dessert cart. College students who are asked whether they'd risk wasting 30 minutes in exchange for a chance to win all the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies they could eat are more likely to say yes if they actually see (and smell) the cookies than if they are merely told about them.

Hunger, however, is nothing compared to lust. A follow-up study exposed young men to either a written or a (more visceral) filmed scenario depicting a couple who had met earlier in the evening and are now discussing the possibility of (imminently) having sex. Both are in favor, but neither party has a condom, and there is no store nearby. The woman reports that she is taking a contraceptive pill and is disease-free; she leaves it up to the man to decide whether to proceed, unprotected. Subjects were then asked to rate their own probability of having unprotected sex if they were in the male character's shoes. Guess which group of men — readers or video watchers — was more likely to throw caution to the wind? (Undergraduate men are also apparently able to persuade themselves that their risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease goes down precisely as the attractiveness of their potential partner goes up.) The notion that men might think with organs below the brain is not new, but the experimental evidence highlights rather vividly the degree to which our choices don't necessarily follow from purely 'rational' considerations. Hunger, lust, happiness, and sadness are all factors that most of us would say shouldn't enter into rational thought. Yet evolution's progressive overlay of technology has guaranteed that each wields an influence, even when we insist otherwise.

The clumsiness of our decision-making ability becomes especially clear when we consider moral choices. Suppose, for example, that a runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. You (and you alone) are in a position such that you can hit a switch to divert the trolley onto a different set of tracks, where it would kill only one person instead of five. Do you hit the switch?

Now, suppose instead that you are on a footbridge, standing above the track that bears the runaway trolley. This time, saving the five people would require you to push a rather large person (considerably bigger than you, so don't bother to volunteer yourself) off the footbridge and into the oncoming trolley. The large person in question would, should you toss him over, die, allowing the other five to survive. Would thatbe okay? Although most people answer yes to the scenario involving the switch, most people say no to pushing someone off the footbridge — even though in both cases five lives are saved at the cost of one.

Why the difference? Nobody knows for sure, but part of the answer seems to be that there is something more visceral about the second scenario; it's one thing to flip a switch, which is inanimate and somewhat removed from the actual collision, and another to forcibly send someone to his death.

One historical example of how visceral feelings affect moral choice is the unofficial truce called by British and German soldiers during Christmas 1914, early in World War I. The original intention was to resume battle afterward, but the soldiers got to know one another during the truce; some even shared a Christmas meal. In so doing, they shifted from conceptualizing one another as enemies to seeing each other as flesh-and-blood individuals. The consequence was that after the Christmas truce, the soldiers were no longer able to kill one another. As the former president Jimmy Carter put it in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture (2002), 'In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents.'

Both the trolley problem and the Christmas truce remind us that though our moral choices may seem to be the product of a single process of deliberative reasoning, our gut, in the end, often also plays a huge role, whether we are speaking of something mundane, like a new car, or making decisions with lives at stake.

The trolley scenarios illustrate the split by showing how we can get two different answers to essentially the same question, depending on which system we tap into. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has tried to go a step further, arguing that we can have strong moral intuitions even when we can't back them up with explicit reasons. Consider, for example, the following scenario: