Month: September 2020

The Mental Scaffolding for Religious Belief

The Mental Scaffolding of Religious Belief

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday’s post was about our mental structure for seeing causality in the world where there is none. We attribute agency to inanimate objects, imbue them with emotions, attribute intentions, and ascribe goals to objects that don’t appear to have any capacity for conscious thought or awareness. From a young age, our minds are built to see causality in the world, and we attribute causal actions linked to preferred outcomes to people, animals, plants, cars, basketballs, hurricanes, computers, and more. This post takes an additional step, looking at how our mind that intuitively perceives causal actions all around us plunges us into a framework for religious beliefs. There are structures in the mind that act as mental scaffolding for the construction of religious beliefs, and understanding these structures helps shed light on what is taking place inside the human mind.

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes the following:

 

“The psychologists Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. He observes that we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. The two models of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die.”

 

From the time that we are small children, we experience a desire for a change in the physical state around us. When we are tiny, we have no control over the world around us, but as we grow we develop the capacity to change the physical world to align with our desires. Infants who cannot directly change their environment express some type of discomfort by crying, and (hopefully) receiving loving attention. From a small age, we begin to understand that expressing some sort of discomfort brings change and comfort from a being that is larger and more powerful than we are.

 

This is an idea I heard years ago on a podcast. I don’t remember what show it was, but the argument that the guest presented was that humans have a capacity for imaging a higher being with greater power than what we have because that is literally the case when we are born. From the time we are in the womb to when we are first born, we experience larger individuals who provide for us, feed us, protect us, and literally talk down to us as if from above. In the womb we literally are within a protective world that nourishes our bodies and is ever present and ever powerful. We have an innate sense that there is something more than us, because we develop within another person, literally experiencing that we are part of something bigger. And when we are tiny and have no control over our world, someone else is there to protect and take care of us, and all we need to do to summon help is to cry out to the sky as we lay on our backs.

 

As we age, we learn to control our physical bodies with our mental thoughts and learn to use language to communicate our desired to other people. We don’t experience the build up action potentials between neurons prior to our decisions to do something. We only experience us, acting in the world and mentally interpreting what is around us. We carry with us the innate sense that we are part of something bigger and that there is a protector out there who will come to us if we cry out toward the sky. We don’t experience the phenomenological reality of the universe, we experience the narrative that we develop in our minds beginning at very young ages.

 

My argument in this piece is that both Paul Bloom as presented in Kahneman’s book and the argument from the scientist in the podcast are correct. The mind contains scaffolding for religious beliefs, making the idea that a larger deity exists and is the original causal factor of the universe feel so intuitive. Our brains are effectively primed to look for things that support the intuitive sense of our religions, even if there is no causal structure there, or if the causal structure can be explained in a more scientific and rational manner.
Seeing Agents

Seeing Agents

Posted on by jabittan
As I got about half-way through my undergraduate degree, a key thought process in my brain began to change. It was an intentional change on my part, and one that took quite a lot of effort. After several years I was able to stop seeing agency in things that were not alive. I was able to get away from the mindset of everything happens for a reason and I started to accept that some things were random, some things were only imbued with meaning by me, and potentially everything in the universe is the result of physical laws of nature.

 

Today I don’t believe that the table at which I write has any emotional experience of me using it to type out a blog post. I don’t think my car actually knows if I drive it today, and I don’t think that it has some preference deep inside to be driven. I don’t believe that the house I am about to move out of will actually be sad (or happy) to see me leave. But there was a time in my life where a piece of me may have believed such things. I certainly knew the houses, stuffed animals, and cars were not alive, but somewhere deep inside I was assigning agency to inanimate objects, imbuing them with emotions, thoughts, and desires of their own.

 

It is more than just cartoons that made me think the way I did about inanimate objects, and that is why it took several years late in my undergraduate degree to begin changing the way I thought about the world. I was seeing agents where there were none, and it was hard to remove agency from things that I had animated in my own mind. Research presented in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow helps explain what was happening inside my mind:

 

“The perception of intention and emotion is irresistible; only people afflicted by autism do not experience it. All this is entirely in your mind of course. Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities. Here again, the evidence is that we are born prepared to make intentional attributions…” 

 

Kahneman describes a study in which participants watch geometric shapes chase each other around on a screen. People see random shapes and assign meaning, intention, and agency to the two dimensional objects. We create a story that justifies the behavior we intuit from them and gives them life. Our mind is geared to see agents where there are none, probably to help us understand other people, to be able to reflect on our own emotions, and to become better social beings. Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens discusses how the cognitive revolution may have brought about this ability in our minds, by giving us the capacity for imagination, and the capacity to create narratives and stories to foster social cohesion and shared meaning.

 

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much if you name your car and view it as having agency, you might even treat it better if you do. However, this can spill over into other aspects of our lives in problematic ways. We can become too attached to material objects, unable to let go of clutter and stuff. As Kahneman continues, and as I’ll write about tomorrow, this is also likely part of why we see the world so often through religious eyes, and conflicting religious beliefs and values have certainly been at the root of much violence and death in human existence, even if religion has given us community and social mission. Seeing agents where they do not exist is an interesting part of our humanity, and it can help us gel together, or can serve as the base for out-casting others and bringing violence upon them. Its not easy to overcome, but I think it is necessary if we are to have accurate beliefs about the world and advance as a global community.
Seeing Causality

Seeing Causality

Posted on by jabittan
In Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman describes how a Belgian psychologist changed the way that we understand our thinking in regard to causality. The traditional thinking held that we make observations about the world and come to understand causality through repeated exposure to phenomenological events. As Kahneman writes, “[Albert] Michotte [1945] had a different idea: he argued that we see causality just as directly as we see color.”

 

The argument from Michotte is that causality is an integral part of the human psyche. We think and understand the world through a causal lens. From the time we are infants, we interpret the world causally and we can see and understand causal links and connections in the things that happen around us. It is not through repeated experience and exposure that we learn to view an event as having a cause or as being the cause of another event. It is something we have within us from the beginning.

 

“We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.”

 

I try to remember this idea of our intuitive and automatic causal understanding of the world when I think about science and how I should relate to science. We go through a lot of effort to make sure that we are as clear as possible with our scientific thinking. We use randomized controlled trials (RCT) to test the accuracy of our hypothesis, but sometimes, an intensely rigorous scientific study isn’t necessary for us to make changes in our behavior based on simple scientific exploration via normal causal thinking. There are some times where we can trust our causal intuition, and without having to rely on an RCT for evidence. I don’t know where to draw the line between causal inferences that we can accept and those that need an RCT, but through honest self-awareness and reflection, we should be able to identify times when our causal interpretations demonstrate validity and are reasonably well insulated from our own self-interests.

 

The Don’t Panic Geocast has discussed two academic journal articles on the effectiveness of parachutes for preventing death when falling from an aircraft during the Fun Paper Friday segment of two episodes. The two papers, both published in the British Medical Journal, are satirical, but demonstrate an important point. We don’t need to conduct an RCT to determine whether using a parachute when jumping from a plane will be more effective at helping us survive the fall than not using a backpack. It is an extreme example, but it demonstrates that our minds can see and understand causality without always needing an experiment to confirm a causal link. In a more consequential example, we can trust our brains when they observe that smoking cigarettes has negative health consequences including increased likelihood of an individual developing lung cancer. An RCT to determine the exact nature and frequency of cancer development in smokers would certainly be helpful in building our scientific knowledge, but the scientific consensus around smoking and cancer should have been accepted much more readily than what it was. An RCT in this example would take years and would potentially be unethical or impossible. Tobacco companies obfuscated the science by taking advantage of the fact that an RCT in this case couldn’t be performed, and we failed to accept the causal link that our brains could see, but could not prove as definitively as we can prove something with an RCT. Nevertheless, we should have trusted our causal thinking brains, and accepted the intuitive answer.

 

We can’t always trust the causal conclusions that our mind reaches, but there are times where we should acknowledge that our brains think causally, and accept that the causal links that we intuit are accurate.
A Capacity for Surprise

A Capacity for Surprise

Posted on by jabittan
For much of our waking life we operate on System 1, or we at least allow System 1 to be in control of many of our actions, thoughts, and reactions to the world around us. We don’t normally have to think very hard about our commute to work, we can practically walk through the house in the early morning on our way to the coffee machine with our eyes closed, and we can nod to the Walmart greeter and completely forget them half a second after we have passed. Most of the time, the pattern of associated ideas from System 1 is great at getting us through the world, but occasionally, something happens that doesn’t fit the model. Occasionally, something reveals our capacity for surprise.

 

Seeing someone juggling in the middle of the shopping isle in Walmart would be a surprise (although less of a surprise in a Walmart than in some other places). Stepping on a stray Lego is an unwelcome early morning pre-coffee surprise, as is an unexpected road closure on our commute. These are examples of large surprises in our daily routine, but we can also have very small surprises, like when someone tells us we will be meeting with Aaron to discuss our personal financial plan, and in walks Erin, surprising us by being a woman in a position we may have subconsciously associated with men.

 

“A capacity for surprise is an essential aspect of our mental life,” writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “and surprise itself is the most sensitive indication of how we understand our world and what we expect from it.”

 

Because so much of our lives is in the hands of System 1, we are frequently surprised. If we consciously think about the world and the vast array of possibilities at any moment, we might not be too surprised at any given outcome. We also would be paralyzed by trying to make predictions of a million different outcomes for the next five minutes. System 1 eases our cognitive load and sets us up for routine expectations based on the model of the world it has adapted from experience. Surprise occurs when something violates our model, and one of the best ways to understand what that model looks like is to look at the situations that surprise us.

 

Bias is revealed through surprise, when an associated pattern is interrupted by something that we were not expecting. The examples can be harmless, such as not expecting a friend to answer the phone sick, with a raspy and sleepy voice. But often our surprise can reveal more consequential biases, such as when we are surprised to see a person of a racial minority in a position of authority. It might not seem like much, but our surprise can convey a lot of information about what we expect and how we understand the world, and other people might pick up on that even if we didn’t intend to convey a certain expectation about another person’s place in the world. We are constantly making predictions about what we will experience in the world, and our capacity for surprise reveals the biases that exist within our predictions, saying something meaningful about what our model of the world looks like.
Patterns of Associated Ideas

Patterns of Associated Ideas

Posted on by jabittan
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that our brains try to conserve energy by operating on what he calls System 1. The part of our brain that is intuitive, automatic, and makes quick assessments of the world is System 1. It doesn’t require intense focus, it quickly scans our environment, and it simply ignores stimuli that are not crucially important to our survival or the task at hand. System 1 is our low-power resting mode, saving energy so that when we need to, we can activate System 2 for more important mental tasks.

 

Without our conscious recognition, System 1 builds mental mental models of the world that shape the narrative that we use to understand everything that happens around us. It develops simple association and expectations for things like when we eat, what we expect people to look like, and how we expect the world to react when we move through it. Kahneman writes, “as these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and determines your interpretations of the present as well as your expectations of the future.”

 

It isn’t uncommon for people different people to watch the same TV show, read the same news article, or witness the same event and walk away with completely different interpretations. We might not like a TV show that everyone else loves. We might reach a vastly different conclusion from reading a news article about global warming, and we might interpret the actions or words of another person completely differently. Part of why we don’t all see things the same, Kahneman might argue, is because we have all trained our System 1 in unique ways. We have different patterns of associated ideas that we use to fit information into a comprehensive narrative.

 

If you never have interactions with people who are different than you are, then you might be surprised when people don’t behave the way you expect. When you have a limited background and experience, then your System 1 will develop a pattern of associated ideas that might not generalize to situations that are new for you. How you see and understand the world is in some ways automatic, determined by the pattern of associated ideas that your System 1 has built over the years. It is unique to you, and won’t fit perfectly with the associated ideas that other people develop.

 

We don’t have control over System 1. If we active our System 2, we can start  to influence what factors stand out to System 1, but under normal circumstances, System 1 will move along building the world that fits its experiences and expectations. This works if we want to move through the world on auto-pilot with few new experiences, but if we want to be more engaged in the world and want to better understand the variety of humanity that exists in the world, our System 1 on its own will never be enough, and it will continually let us down.
Mood, Creativity, & Cognitive Errors

Mood, Creativity, & Cognitive Errors

Posted on by jabittan
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman comments on research studying people’s mood and cognitive performance. He writes the following about how we think when we are in a good mood, “when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.”

 

We think differently when we are in different moods. When we are relaxed and happy, our minds are more creative and our intuitions tend to be more accurate. Kahneman suggests that when we are happy and when we don’t sense threats, our rational and logical part of the brain lets up, allowing our mind to flow more freely. When we are not worried about our safety, our mind doesn’t have to examine and interrogate everything in our environment as thoroughly, hence the tendency toward logical errors. A sense of threat activates our deep thinking, making us more logical, but also diminishing the capacity of our intuitive thinking and making us less creative, less willing to take risks with our ideas and thoughts.

 

The research from Kahneman about mood, creativity, and cognitive errors reminds me of the research Daniel Pink shares in his book When. Pink finds that we tend to be more creative in the afternoons, once our affect has recovered from the afternoon trough when we all need a nap. Once our mood has improved toward the end of the day, Pink suggest that we are more creative. Our minds are able to return to important cognitive work, but are still easily distracted, allowing for more creative thinking.  This seems to tie in with the research from Kahneman. We become more relaxed, and are willing to let ideas flow across the logical boundaries that had previously separated ideas and categories of thought in our minds.

 

It is important that we think about our mood and the tasks we have at hand. If we need to do creative work, we should save it for the afternoon, when our moods improve and we have more capacity for drawing on previously disconnected thoughts and ideas in new ways. We shouldn’t try to cram work that requires logical coherence into times when we are happy and bubbly, our minds simply won’t be operating in the right way to handle the task. When we do work is as important as the mood we bring to work, and both the when and the mood may seriously impact the output.
Performance and Mood

Performance and Mood

Posted on by jabittan
We are in the middle of a global health pandemic, but it comes at a time when companies are starting to radically re-think the work environments they set up for their employees. I worked for a time for a tech company based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, and saw first hand the changing thoughts in how companies relate to their employees. Every day wasn’t a party, but companies like the one I worked for were beginning to recognize how important a healthy, happy, and agreeable workforce is to productivity and good outcomes as whole. The pandemic has forced companies to think even more deeply about these things, and some blend of remote and office work schedules will likely remain for a huge number of employees. Hopefully, we will walk away from the pandemic with workplaces that better align with the demands placed on people today, and hopefully we will be more happy in our work environments.

 

Research that Daniel Kahneman presents in his book Thinking Fast and Slow suggest that adapting workplaces to better accommodate employees and help them be more happy with their work could have huge positive impacts for our futures. Regarding tests for intuitive accuracy, Kahneman shares the following about people’s performance on tests and their mood:

 

“Putting participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random.”

 

Our mood impacts our thoughts and our thinking processes. When we are happy, we are better at making intuitive connections and associations. If we need to be productive, accurate, and intuitive, then we better have an environment that supports a relatively high level of happiness.

 

If our work environment does the opposite, if we are overwhelmed by stress and must deal with toxic culture issues, then it is likely that we will be less accurate with our tasks. We won’t perform as well, and those who depend on our work will receive sub-par products.

 

There is likely a self-perpetuating effect with both scenarios. A happy person is likely to perform better, and they will likely be praised for their good outcomes, improving their happiness and reinforcing their good work. But someone who is unhappy will likely have poor performance and is more likely to be reprimanded, leading to more unhappiness and continued unsatisfactory performance. For these reasons it is important that companies take steps to help put their employees in a good mood while working. This requires more than motivational posters, it requires real relationships and inclusion in important decisions around the workspace. In the long run, boosting mood among employees can have a huge impact, especially if the good results reinforce more positive feeling and continued high quality output. Changing work schedules and locations as forced upon employers by the pandemic can provide an opportunity for employers to think about the demands they place on employees, and what they can do to ensure their employees have healthy, safe workplaces that encourage positive moods and productivity.
Guided by Impressions of System 1

Guided by Impressions of System 1

Posted on by jabittan
In Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman shares research showing how easily people can be tricked or influenced by factors that seem to be completely irrelevant to the mental task that the people are asked to carry out. People will remember rhyming proverbs better than non-rhyming proverbs. People will trust a cited research source with an easy to say name over a difficult and foreign sounding name. People will also be influenced by the quality of paper and colors used in advertising materials. No one would admit that rhymes, easy to say names, or paper quality is why they made a certain decision, but statistics show that these things can strongly influence how we decide.

 

Kahneman describes the research this way, “The psychologists who do these experiments do not believe that people are stupid or infinitely gullible. What psychologists do believe is that all of us live much of our life guided by the impressions of System 1 – and we often do not know the source of these impressions.”

 

Making tough and important decisions requires a lot of energy. In many instances, we have to make tough decisions that require a lot of mental effort in a relatively short time. We don’t always have a great pen and paper template to follow for decision-making, and sometimes we have to come to a conclusion in the presence of others, upping the stakes and increasing the pressure as we try to think through our options. As a result, the brain turns to heuristics reliant on System 1. The brain uses intuition, quick impressions, and substitutes questions for an easier decision.

 

We might not know why we intuitively favored one option over the other. When we ask our brain to think back on the decision we made, we are engaging System 2 to think deeply, and it is likely going to overlook and not consider inconsequential factors such as the color of the paper for the option we picked. It won’t remember that the first sales person didn’t make much eye contact with us and that the second person did, but it will substitute some other aspect of competence to give us a reason for trusting sales person number two more.

 

What is important to remember is that System 1 guides a lot of our lives. We don’t always realize it, but System 1 is passing along information to System 2 that isn’t always relevant for the decision that System 2 has to make. Intuitions and quick impressions can be biased and formed by unimportant factors, but even if we don’t consciously recognize them, they get passed along and calculated into our final choice.
Familiarity vs Truth

Familiarity vs Truth

Posted on by jabittan
People who wish to spread disinformation don’t have to try very hard to get people to believe that what they are saying is true, or that their BS at least has some element of truth to it. All it takes, is frequent repetition. “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods,” writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

 

Having accurate and correct representations of the world feels important to me. I really love science. I listen to lots of science based podcasts, love sciency discussions with family members and friends, and enjoy reading science books. By accurately understanding how the world operates, by seeking to better understand the truth of the universe, and by developing better models and systems to represent the way nature works, I believe we can find a better future. I try not to fall unthinkingly into techno-utopianism thinking, but I do think that having accurate beliefs and understandings are important for improving the lives of people across the planet.

 

Unfortunately, for many people, I don’t think that accurate and correct understandings of the worlds have such high priority in their lives. I fear that religion and science may be incompatible or at odds with each other, and there may be a willingness to accept inaccurate science or beliefs to support religious doctrine. I also fear that people in extractive industries may discount science, preferring to hold an inaccurate belief that supports their ability to profit through their extractive practices. Additionally, the findings, conclusions, and recommendations from science may just be scary for many ordinary people, and accepting what science says might be inconvenient or might require changes in lifestyles that people don’t want to make. When we are in this situations, it isn’t hard to imagine why we might turn away from scientific consensus in favor of something comfortable but wrong.

 

And this is where accurate representations of the universe face and uphill battle. Inaccuracies don’t need to be convincing, don’t really need to sound plausible, and don’t need to to come from credible authorities. They just need to be repeated on a regular basis. When we hear something over and over, we start to become familiar with the argument, and we start to have trouble telling the truth and falsehood apart. This happened in 2016 when the number one word associated with Hillary Clinton was Emails. It happened with global warming when enough people suggested that human related CO2 emissions were not related to the climate change we see. And it happens every day in trite sayings and ideas from trickle down economics to popping your knuckles causes arthritis.

 

I don’t think that disproving inaccuracies is the best route to solving the problem of familiarity vs truth. I think the only thing we can hope to do is amplify those ideas, conclusions, experiments, and findings which accurately reflect the true nature of reality. We have to focus on what is true, not on all the misleading nonsense that gets repeated. We must repeat accurate statements about the universe so that they are what become familiar, rather than the mistaken ideas that become hard to distinguish from the truth.
Thoughts on Biases

Thoughts on Biases

Posted on by jabittan
“Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs,” writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Biases are an unavoidable part of our thinking. They can lead to terrible prejudices, habits, and meaningless preferences, but they can also help save us a lot of time, reduce the cognitive demand on our brains, and help us move smoothly through the world. There are too many decision points in our lives and too much information for us to absorb at any one moment for us to not develop shortcuts and heuristics to help our brain think quicker. Quick rules for associative thinking are part of the process of helping us actually exist in the world, and they necessarily create biases.

 

A bad sushi roll might bias us against sushi for the rest of our life. A jump-scare movie experience as a child might bias us toward romcoms and away from horror movies. And being bullied by a beefy kid in elementary school might bias us against muscular dudes and sports. In each instance, a negative experience is associated in our brains with some category of thing (food, entertainment, people) and our memory is helping us move toward things we are more likely to like (or at least less likely to bring us harm). The consequences can be low stakes, like not going to horror movies, but can also be high stakes, like not hiring someone because their physical appearance reminds you of a kid who bullied you as a child.

 

What is important to note here is that biases are natural and to some extent unavoidable. They develop from our experiences and the associations we make as move through life and try to understand the world. They can be defining parts of our personality (I only drink black coffee), they can be incidental pieces of us that we barely notice (my doughnut choice order is buttermilk bar, maple covered anything, chocolate, plain glaze), and they could also be far more dangerous (I have an impulse to think terrible things about anyone with a bumper sticker for a certain political figure – and I have to consciously fight the impulse). Ultimately, we develop biases because it helps us make easier decisions that will match our preferences and minimize our chances of being upset. They are mental shortcuts, saving us from having to make tough decisions and helping us reach conclusions about entire groups of things more quickly.

 

The goal for our society shouldn’t be to completely eliminate all instances of bias in our lives. That would require too much thought and effort for each of us, and we don’t really have the mental capacity to make so many decisions. It is OK if we are biased toward Starbucks rather than having to make a decision about what coffee shop to go to each morning, or which new coffee shop to try in a town we have never visited.

 

What we should do, is work hard to recognize biases that can really impact our lives and have negative consequences. We have to acknowledge that we have negative impulses toward certain kids of people, and we have to think deeply about those biases and work to be aware of how we treat people. Don’t pretend that you move through the world free from problematic biases. Instead, work to see those biases, and work to push against your initial negative reaction and think about ways that you could have more positive interactions with others, and how you can find empathy and shared humanity with them. Allow biases to remain when helpful or insignificant (be biased toward vegetarian take-out for example), but think critically about biases that could have real impacts in your life and in the lives of others.