We like to believe that having more information will make us more confident in our decisions and opinions. The opposite, however, may be true. I have written in the past about a jam study, where participants who selected jam from a sample of a few jams were more happy with their choice than participants who selected jam from a sample of several dozen jam options. More information and more choices seems like it would help make us more happy and make us more confident with our decision, but those who selected jam from the small sample were happier than those who had several dozen jam options.
We like simple stories. They are easy for our brain to construct a narrative around and easy for us to have confidence in. The stories we tell ourselves and the conclusions we reach are often simplistic, often built on incomplete information, and often lack the nuance that is necessary to truly reflect reality. Our brains don’t want to work too hard, and don’t want to hold conflicting information that forces an unpleasant compromise. We don’t want to constantly wonder if we made the right choice, if we should do something different, if we need to try another option. We just want to make a decision and have someone tell us it was a good decision, regardless of the actual outcome or impact on our lives, the lives of others, or the planet.
Daniel Kahneman writes about this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. He describes a study (not the jam study) where participants were presented with either one side or two sides of an argument. They had to chose which side they agreed with, and rate their confidence. “Participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments than those who saw both sides,” writes Kahneman, “This is just what you would expect if the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
Learning a lot and truly understanding any given issue is challenging because it means we must build a complex picture of the world. We can’t rely on simple arguments and outlooks on life when we start to get into the weeds of an issue or topic. We will see that admirable people have tragic flaws. We will see that policies which benefit us may exploit others. We will find that things we wish to be true about who we are and the world we live in are only semi-true. Ignorance is bliss in the sense that knowing only a little bit about the world will allow you to paint a picture that makes sense to you, but it won’t be accurate about the world and it won’t acknowledge the negative externalities that the story may create. Simplistic narratives may help us come together as sports fans, or as consumers, or as a nation, but we should all be worried about what happens when we have to accept the inaccuracies of our stories. How we do we weave a complex narrative that will bring people across the world together in a meaningful and peaceful way without driving inequality and negative externalities? That is the challenge of the age, and unfortunately, the better we try to be at accurately depicting the world we inhabit, the less confident any of us will be about the conclusions and decisions for how we should move forward.
Novel Learning 