Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

mind (cont.) as optimal, 6-9 reflexive vs. deliberative systems in, 51-53 Mischel, Walter, 69-70 mnemonic devices, 34-36 money evolution and, 75-76 induced lust for, 76n relative thinking about, 73-75,78 moral choice, 90-92, rjon moral dumbfounding, 91-92 mortality salience, 50,172 motivated reasoning belief and, 55-57 mental illness and, 155-60 pleasure and, 139-43 music, 133-34

Nash, Ogden, 110 naturalistic fallacy, 164 natural selection. See evolution Nesse, Randolph, 124,127 neural substrates ancestral vs. deliberative system and, 13,51,142-43 logical reasoning and, 63 moral choices and, 92 pleasure and, 142-43 Nilsson, Harry, 56 Nisbett, Richard, 167 nonhuman primates, 14,116 nucleus accumbens, 143

objectivity confirmation bias and, 53-55 motivated reasoning and, 55-57 subjective impressions and, 45

onomatopoeia, 108 opportunity costs, 169 optimization, 6-9 Orgel, Leslie, 16 Orwell, George, 29-30 others, attitudes toward familiarity and, 50 happiness and, 125,142 overgeneralization, 159-60

paralinguistic information, 114, 119-21 paranoia, 156 parentheses, 120n “partial matching,” logic of, 111-12 perception belief and, 65-67 choice and, 89 perfection evolutionary history and, 9-11, 16-17, 162-63 human language and, 96-101, 113-16 value of imperfections and, 16364 Perkins, David, i74n Perot, Ross, 30 personalization, 159-60 Pew Research Center, 2007 survey, 58 “Philosophy for Children” curriculum, 175-76 phonation, 106 phonemes, 109-10 physical disorders, beneficial, 152 Pinker, Steven, 7, 36, 116, 135 Piraha (Amazonian language), 113 “pitchfork effect,” 42

Plato, 101 pleasure context and, 138-39 duration of, 135-38 evolution of, 124-27,128-35 mental illness and, 158-59 self-deception and, 139-43 “pleasure technologies,” 135 poetry, 38, 97n, 164 pointing-at-circles task, 71-72 Pollyanna (Porter), 55 Porter, Eleanor, 55 positive priming effect, 124 “postal-code memory” in computers, 20-21 human cognition and, 31-34,36 prefrontal cortex, 142-43 Premack, David, 116 The Price Is Right (TV show), 78n priming. See also framing belief and, 43-44 contextual memory and, 23,24, 25 decision making and, 88-89 pleasure and, 124 for rationality, 172 prioritization, 22 prisoner’s dilemma, 88-89 procrastination, 147-49 Proust, Marcel, 24,25 Pullum, Geoff, 121

quantifiers, 112-13

Rachlin, Howard, 85-86 rational choice theory evolution and, 72, 75-76, 84 reaching and, 70-71

relative sense of value and, 73-75, 78-80 sunk costs and, 77-78 weakness of the will and, 76-77 reaching, 71-73 reasoning power, improvement of, 165-72 recency belief and, 45-46 contextual memory and, 31-34, 37,45-46 reconstruction techniques, 33 recursion, 115-18 redundancy, 97, 98-99 reflexive vs. deliberative systems, 51-53 addiction and, 155 contingency plans and, 168 decision making and, 86-88, 92-94 language and, 113 mental disorders and, 155-60 mental errors and, 145-46 pleasure and, 123-24, 128, 134, 142-43 religion, 58-59 remnants of history, notion of, 1,162 respiration, 106 Roediger, Henry, 37 Rommel, Erwin, 60 Rubin, Robert, 165 ruminative cycle, 157-58 Russell, Bertrand, 97

sample size, 167 satisficing, 11 Schacter, Dan, 37 schizophrenia, 151,158

scientific thinking bias and, 55 education in, 175-76 self-control addictions and, 126-27,130,155 future discounting and, 85-86 precommitment and, 167-68 visceral feelings and, 89-90 weakness of the will and, 69-70, 76-77, 85n self-deception. See confirmation bias; motivated reasoning self-improvement suggestions for, 165-72 sex daydreaming about, 146-47 evolution of pleasure and, 127, 129-30 lust and, 89-90 men vs. women and, 8 moral intuitions and, 91-92 music and, 133~34 reasons for having, i24n sickle cell anemia, 152 Simon, Herb, 11 Simpson, O. J., 33,54 Smith, Adam, 6 smoking, and beliefs, 57 Smylie, Ed, 2 social approval, need for, 154-55 sociopathy, 152-53 sorites paradox, 99-100 source memory, 33-34 spacing out, 146-47 speech errors, 95 speech sounds, 105-10,122 Spinoza, Baruch de, 65-66 Spooner, Rev. William Archibald, 95

statistics, 167 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 121 Stewart, Potter, 123 sunk costs, 77-78 syllogism, 1-2, 60-62 syntactic trees, 111,116-18

television watching, 126 temptation. See self-control Thaler, Richard, 78n time complex decisions and, 170-71 memory for, 32-33 procrastination and, 1 tongue-twisters and, 108-9 tongue- twisters, 95, 108-9 Tooby, John, 7 tradeoffs, 7-9 trolley problem, 90, 91 truth, and belief, 64-67 Tuchman, Barbara, 15 Tversky, Amos, 46

uncertainty. See future discounting

vagueness, 99-100,121. See also language video games, 132 visceral feelings, and choice, 89-92 Von Rundstedt, Gerd, 60

Wason, Peter, 53-54 Wasow, Tom, 114 weakness of the will, 70,76. See also self- control Weinrich, Max, 102 Wikipedia, 70,174 Wilkins, John, 101

Wilson, Margo, 8 for quantification, 112-13 Wilson, Timothy, 135-36,171 as unsystematic, 95-96,101-3, windshield wipers, 4,144 121-22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 111 words Zamenhof, Ludovic Lazarus, 102 logic of partial matching and, 110-12

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Footnotes

1

One could argue that the spelling klooge (rhymes with stooge) would even better capture the pronunciation, but I’m not about to foist a third spelling upon the world.

2

The term Bayesian comes from a particular mathematical theorem stemming from the work of the Reverend Thomas Bayes (1702–1761), although he himself did not propose it as a model for human reasoning. In rough terms, the theorem states that the probability of some event is proportional to the product of the likelihood of that event and its prior probability. For a clear (though somewhat technical) introduction, point your browser to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_statistics.

3

Except, tellingly, those of their sisters.

4

Emphasis on “tends to.” Strictly speaking, the steps taken by evolution may be of any size, but dramatic mutations rarely survive, whereas small modifications often keep enough core systems in place to have a fighting chance. As a statistical matter, small changes thus appear to have a disproportionately large influence on evolution.