aren’t going well, we try to persuade ourselves that everything is fine. (We do the same thing with pain, every time we pop an Advil or an aspirin.)
Take, for example, your average undergraduate around the time I hand out grades. Students who get As are thrilled, they’re happy, and they accept their grades with pleasure, even glee. People with C’s are, as you might imagine, less enthusiastic, dwelling for the most part not on what
Freud would have seen all this self-deception as an illustration of what he called “defense mechanisms”; I see it as motivated reasoning. Either way, examples like these exemplify our habit of trying to fool the thermometer. Why feel bad that we’ve done something wrong when we can so easily jiggle the thermometer? As Jeff Goldblum’s character put it in
We do our best to succeed, but if at first we don’t succeed, we can always lie, dissemble, or rationalize. In keeping with this idea, most Westerners believe themselves to be smarter, fairer, more considerate, more dependable, and more creative than average. And — shades of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where “the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average” — we also convince ourselves that we are better-than-average drivers and have better-than-average health prospects. But you do the math: we can’t
Classic studies of a phenomenon called “cognitive dissonance” make the point in a different way.[47] Back in the late 1950s, Leon Festinger did a famous series of experiments in which he asked subjects (undergraduate students) to do tedious menial tasks (such as sticking a set of plain pegs into an plain board). Here’s the rub: some subjects were paid well ($20, a lot of money in 1959), but others, poorly ($1). Afterward, all were asked how much they liked the task. People who were paid well typically confessed to being bored, but people who were paid only a dollar tended to delude themselves into thinking that putting all those pegs into little holes was fun. Evidently they didn’t want to admit to themselves that they’d wasted their time. Once again, who’s directing whom? Is happiness guiding us, or are we micromanaging our own guide? It’s as if we paid a sherpa to guide us up a mountain — only to ignore him whenever he told us we were going in the wrong direction. In short, we do everything in our power to make ourselves happy and comfortable with the world, but we stand perfectly ready to lie to ourselves if the truth doesn’t cooperate.
Our tendency toward self-deception can lead us to lie not just about ourselves but about others. The psychologist Melvyn Lerner, for example, identified what he called a “Belief in a Just World”; it feels better to live in a world that seems just than one that seems unjust. Taken to its extreme, that belief can lead people to do things that are downright deplorable, such as blaming innocent victims. Rape victims, for example, are sometimes perceived as if they are to blame, or “had it coming.” Perhaps the apotheosis of this sort of behavior occurred during the Irish potato famine, when a rather objectionable English politician said that “the great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the people.” Blaming victims may allow us to cling to the happy notion that the world is just, but its moral costs are often considerable.
A robot that was more sensibly engineered might retain the capacity for deliberative reason but dispense with all the rationalization and self-deception. Such a robot would be aware of its present state but prepared, Buddha-like, to accept it, good or bad, with equanimity rather than agony, and thus choose to take actions based on reality rather than delusion.
In biological terms, the neurotransmitters that underlie emotion, such as dopamine and serotonin, are ancient, tracing their history at least to the first vertebrates and playing a pivotal role in the reflexive systems of animals including fish, birds, and even mammals. Humans, with our massive prefrontal cortex, add substantial reflective reasoning on top, and thus we find ourselves with an instrument-fooling kluge. Virtually every study of reasoned decision making locates this capacity in the prefrontal cortex; emotion is attributed to the limbic system (and oribitofrontal cortex). A spot known as the anterior cingulate, souped up in human beings and other great apes, seems to mediate between the two. Deliberative prefrontal thought is piled
What’s the best evidence for this split? Teenagers. Teenagers as a species seem almost pathologically driven by short-term rewards. They make unrealistic estimates of the attendant risks and pay little attention to long-term costs. Why? According to one recent study, the nucleus accumbens, which assesses reward, matures before the orbital frontal cortex, which guides long-term planning and deliberative reasoning. Thus teenagers may have an adult capacity to appreciate short-term gain, but only a child’s capacity to recognize long-term risk.
Here again, evolutionary inertia takes precedence over sensible design. Ideally, our judicious system and our reflexive system would mature at comparable rates. But perhaps because of the dynamics of how genomes change, biology tends, on average, to put together the evolutionarily old before the evolutionarily new. The spine, for example, a structure that is shared by all vertebrates, develops before the toes, which evolved more recently. The same thing happens with the brain — the ancestral precedes the modern, which perhaps helps us understand why teens, almost literally, often don’t know what to do with themselves. Pleasure, in the context of a system not yet fully wired, can be a dangerous thing. Pleasure giveth, and pleasure taketh away.
7. THINGS FALL APART
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
ENGINEERS WOULD PROBABLY build kluges more often if it were not for one small fact: that which is clumsy is rarely reliable. Kluges are often (though not always) designed to last for a moment, not a lifetime. On
There can be little doubt that the human brain too is fragile, and not just because it routinely commits the cognitive errors we’ve already discussed, but also because it is deeply vulnerable both to minor malfunctions and even, in some cases, severe breakdown. The mildest malfunctions are what chess masters call blunders and a Norwegian friend of mine calls “brain farts” — momentary lapses of reason and attention that cause chagrin (d’Oh!) and the occasional traffic accident. We know better, but for a moment we just plain goof. Despite our best intentions, our brain just doesn’t manage to do what we want it to. No one is immune to this. Even Tiger Woods occasionally misses an easy putt.
At the risk of stating the obvious, properly programmed computers simply don’t make these kinds of transient blunders. My laptop has never, ever forgotten to “carry the one” in the midst of a complicated sum, nor (to my chagrin) has it “spaced out” and neglected to protect its queen during a game of chess. Eskimos don’t really have 500 words for snow, but we English speakers sure have a lot of words for our cognitive short circuits: not just
