Tag: Rationalization

Post-Action Rationalization

Post-Action Rationalization

Posted on by jabittan
I have heard people write about a split brain experiment where a participant whose corpus collosum was severed was instructed in one ear, through a pair of headphones, to leave the room they were in because the experiment was over. As the participant stood to leave the room, a researcher asked them why they had gotten up. The participant said they wanted to get something to drink.
This experiment is pretty famous and demonstrates the human ability to rationalize our behaviors even when we really don’t know what prompted us to behave in one way or another. If you have ever been surprised that you had an angry outburst at another person, if you have ever had a gut feeling in an athletic competition, and if you ever forgot something important in a report and been bewildered by your omission, then you have probably engaged in post-action rationalization. You have probably thought back over the event, the mental state you were in, and tried to figure out exactly why you did what you did and not something else.
However, Judea Pearl in The Book of Why would argue that your answer is nothing more than an illusion. Writing about this phenomenon he says:
“Rationalization of actions may be a reconstructive, post-action process. For example, a soccer player may explain why he decided to pass the ball to Joe instead of Charlie, but it is rarely the case that those reasons consciously triggered the action. In the heat of the game, thousands of input signals compete for the player’s attention. The crucial decision is which signals to prioritize, and the reasons can hardly be recalled and articulated.”
Your angry traffic outburst was brought on by a huge number of factors. Your in game decision was not something you paused, thought about, and worked out the physics to perfect before hand. Similarly, your omission on a report was a barely conscious lapse of information. Each of these situations we can rationalize and explain based on several salient factors that come to mind post-action, but that hardly describes how our brain was actually working in the moment.
The brain has to figure out what signals to prioritize and what signals to consciously respond to in order for each of the examples I mentioned to come about. These notions should challenge our ideas of free-will, our beliefs that we can ever truly know ourselves, and our confidence in learning from experience. Pearl explains that he is a determinist who compromises by accepting an illusion of free will. He argues that the illusion I have described with my examples and his quote helps us to experience and navigate the world. We feel that there is something that it is like to be us, that we make our decisions, and we can justify our behaviors, but this is all merely an illusion.
If Pearl is right, then it is a helpful illusion. We can still understand it better, still understand how this illusion is created, sustained, and can be put to the best uses. We might not have a true and authentic self under the illusion. We might not be in control of what the illusion is. But nevertheless, we can shape and mold it, and have a responsibility to do the best with our illusion, even if much of it is post-action rationalization.
Self-deceptive Rationalization

Self-Deceptive Rationalization

Posted on by jabittan
I don’t like doing online personality quizzes. Part of the reason why I dislike them is because I believe that three of the cognitive errors and biases identified by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow are at play when we take online quizzes.
 
 
First, we are influenced by the availability heuristic. Our perception of how common or how accurate something is can be greatly influenced by whether we have an easy or hard time remembering the thing. This can influence how we answer questions about things we normally prefer or normally like to do. We might be answering based on how quickly we remember something, not on how we actually feel about something.
 
 
Second, we might substitute the questions being asked with easier to answer questions. In reality, this is what is happening with the availability heuristic. A difficult self-reflection question might not be answered directly. We might switch the question out and instead answer a simpler question. In the case of the availability heuristic, we are answering how easily something came to mind rather than the original question, but this can happen outside of the availability heuristic as well. The result is that we are not really measuring what the question purports to measure.
 
 
Third, Kahneman argues that we can think of ourselves as having two operating systems for how we act and feel in the present moment versus how we reflect back and remember previous experiences. The remembering self has different perceptions than the experiencing self, as Kahneman terms the two systems. The remembering self doesn’t have an accurate memory for how much we liked or disliked certain experiences. Think about a vacation. You may be feeling burnt out with work and life, and all you want to do, what you would enjoy the most in the world, is to sit on a familiar beach doing absolutely nothing. But your remembering self won’t take any exciting and novel memories from a week sitting on a beach doing nothing. Your remembering self would much rather have you go on an exciting yet stressful vacation to a new foreign country. This tension between your experiencing and remembering selves makes the reliability of online personality quizzes questionable. Your remembering self answers the questions, not your experiencing self, and they don’t always have the same opinions.
 
 
What this means, is that the kind of reflection that goes into online personality quizzes, or really any reflective activity, can potentially be self-deceptive. Quassim Cassam writes about these dangers in his book Vices of  the Mind. He writes, “there is always the danger that what critical reflection produces is not self-knowledge, but self-deceptive rationalization.” Our biases and cognitive errors can lead us to incorrect answers about ourselves during self-reflection. This process can feel honest and insightful, but it can often be nothing more than a rationalization for behaviors and actions that we want to believe are true about ourselves. The only way through, Cassam continues to explain, is to cultivate real epistemic virtues, to see the world more clearly, and to recognize our epistemic vices to become better thinkers.

Gut Decisions

Gut Decisions

Posted on by jabittan
“Although about half of professional decisions in large companies are gut decisions, it would probably not go over well if a manager publicly admitted, I had a hunch. In our society, intuition is suspicious. For that reason, managers typically hide their intuitions or have even stopped listening to them,” Gerd Gigerenzer writes in Risk Savvy.

 

The human mind evolved first in small tribal bands trying to survive in a dangerous world. As our tribes grew, our minds evolved to become more politically savvy, learning to intuitively hide our selfish ambitions and appear honest and altruistic. This pushed our brains toward more complex activity, which took place outside our direct consciousness, hiding in gut feelings and intuitions. Today however, we don’t trust those intuitions and gut decisions, even though they never left us.

 

We do have good reason to discount intuitions. Our minds did not evolve to serve us perfectly in a complex, data rich world full of uncertainty. Our brains are plagued by motivated reasoning, biases, and cognitive limitations. Making gut decisions can lead us vulnerable to these mental challenges, leading us to distrust our intuitions.

 

However, this doesn’t mean we have escaped gut decisions. Gerd Gigerenzer thinks that is actually a good thing, especially if we have developed years of insight and expertise through practice and real life training. What Gigerenzer argues is that we still make many gut decisions in areas as diverse as vacation planning, daily exercise, and corporate strategies. We just don’t admit we are making decisions based on intuition rather than careful statistical analysis. Taking it a step further, Gigerezner suggests that most of the time we make a decision at a gut level, and “produce reasons after the fact.” We rationalize and use motivated reasoning to explain why we made a decision and we try to deceive ourselves to believe that we always intended to do the rational calculation first, and that we really hadn’t made up our mind until after we had done so.

 

Gigerenzer suggests that we acknowledge our gut decisions. Ignoring them and pretending they are not influential wastes our time and costs us money. An executive may have an intuitive sense of what to do in terms of a business decision, but may be reluctant to say they made a decision based on intuition. Instead, they spend time doing an analysis that didn’t need to be done. They create reasons to support their decision after the fact, again wasting time and energy that could go into implementing the decision that has already been made. Or an executive may bring in a consulting firm, hoping the firm will come up with the same answer that they got from their gut. Time and money are both wasted, and the decision-making and action-taking structures of the individual and organization are gummed up unnecessarily. Acknowledging gut decisions and moving forward more quickly, Gigerenzer seems to suggest, is better than rationalizing and finding support for gut decisions after the fact.
The Human Need for Certainty - Joe Abittan

The Human Need for Certainty

Posted on by jabittan
Throughout the book Risk Savvy, Gerd Gigerenzer discusses the challenges that people face with thinking statistically, assessing different probable outcomes, and understanding risk. Gigerenzer also discusses how important it is that people become risk literate, and how the future of humanity will require that people better understand risk and uncertainty. What this future requires, he explains, is fighting against aspects of human psychology that are common to all of us and form part of our core nature. One aspect in particular that Gigerenzer highlights as a problem for humans moving forward, is our need for certainty.

 

“Humans appear to have a need for certainty, a motivation to hold onto something rather than to question it,” he writes. Whether it is our religion, our plans for retirement, or the brand of shoes we prefer, we have a need for certainty. We don’t want to question whether our religious, political, or social beliefs are correct. It is more comforting for us to adopt beliefs and be certain that we are correct. We don’t want to continuously re-evaluate our savings plans and open ourselves to the possibility that we are not doing enough to save for retirement. And we like to believe that we purchased the best running shoes, that we bough the most sustainable shoes for the planet, and that our shoe choices are the most popular. In all of these areas, ambiguity makes our decisions harder whereas a feeling of certainty gives us confidence and allows us to move through the world. In many ways, our need for certainty is simply a practicality. There are unlimited possibilities and decisions for us to make every day. Adopting certainty eliminates many possibilities and choices, simplifying our life and allowing us to move through the world without having to question every action of every second of every day.

 

But in the modern world, humans have to be more comfortable living with ambiguity and have to be able to give up certainty in some areas. “For the mature adult,” Gigerenzer writes, “a high need for certainty can be a dangerous thing.”  We live with risk and need to be able to adjust as we face new risks and uncertainties in our lives. We like to hold onto our beliefs and we are not comfortable questioning our decisions, but it can be necessary for us to do so in order to move forward and live in harmony in a changing world with new technologies, different demographics, and new uncertainties. A need for certainty can lead people to become dogmatic, to embrace apologetics when discounting science that demonstrates errors in thinking, and to ignore the realities of a changing world. One way or another, we have to find ways to be flexible and adjust our choices and plans according to risk, otherwise we are likely to make poor choices and be crushed when the world does not align itself with our beliefs and wishes.
A Lack of Internal Consistency

A Lack of Internal Consistency

Posted on by jabittan
Something I have been trying to keep in mind lately is that our internal beliefs are not as consistent as we might imagine. This is important right now because our recent presidential election has highlighted the divide between many Americans. In most of the circles I am a part of, people cannot imagine how anyone could vote for Donald Trump. Since they see President Trump as contemptible, it is hard for them to separate his negative qualities from the people who may vote for him. All negative aspects of Trump and of the ideas that people see him as representing are heaped onto his voters. The problem however, is that none of us have as much internal consistency between our thoughts, ideas, opinions, and beliefs for any of us to justify characterizing as much as half the country as bigoted, uncaring, selfish, or really any other adjective (except maybe self-interested).

 

I have written a lot recently about the narratives we tell ourselves. It is problematic that the more simplistic a narrative, the more believable and accurate it feels to us. The world is incredibly complicated, and a simplistic story that seems to make sense of it all is almost certainly wrong. Given this, it is worth looking at our ideas and views and trying to identify areas where we have inconsistencies in our thoughts. This helps us tease apart our narratives and recognize where simplistic thinking is leading us to unfound conclusions.

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shows us how this inconsistency between our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors can arise, using moral ambiguity as an example. He writes, “the beliefs that you endorse when you reflect about morality do not necessarily govern your emotional reactions, and the moral intuitions that come to your mind in different situations are not internally consistent.”

 

It is easy to adopt a moral position against some immoral behavior or attitude, but when we find ourselves in a situation where we are violating that moral position, we find ways to explain our internal inconsistency without directly violating our initial moral stance. We rationalize why our moral beliefs don’t apply to us in a given situation, and we create a story in our minds where there is no inconsistency at all.

 

Once we know that we do this with our own beliefs toward moral behavior, we should recognize that we do this with every area of life. It is completely possible for us to think entirely contradictory things, but to explain away those contradictions in ways that make sense to us, even if it leaves us with incoherent beliefs. And if we do this ourselves, then we should recognize that other people do this as well. So when we see people voting for a candidate and can’t imagine how they could vote for such a candidate, we should assume that they are making internally inconsistent justifications for voting for that candidate. They are creating a narrative in their head where they are making the best possible decision. They may have truly detestable thoughts and opinions, but we should remember that in their minds they are justified and making rational choices.

 

Rather than simply hating people and heaping every negative quality we can onto them. We should pause and ask what factors might be leading them to justify contemptible behavior. We should look for internal inconsistencies and try to help people recognize these areas and move forward more comprehensively. We should see in the negativity in others something we have the same capacity for, and we should try to find more constructive ways to engage with them and help them shift the narrative that justifies their inconsistent thinking.

Effortlessly Cool

Posted on by jabittan
“All else being equal, we prefer to think that we’re buying a product because it’s something we want for ourselves, not because we’re trying to manage our image or manipulate the impressions of our friends. We want to be cool, but we’d rather be seen as naturally, effortlessly cool, rather than someone who’s trying too hard.”

 

This quote comes from Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler in their book The Elephant in the Brain. The authors describe some of the processes taking place in our brain when we make purchases that we don’t like to acknowledge. We prefer to hide some of these less than flattering motives when we buy something and we create a surface level reason for our purchase that sounds reasonable to ourselves and others. We create stories in our heads and that we share with others about how we have not done anything for ourselves recently, about how we have been saving for a purchase and want to make sure we get our money’s worth, and about how we really deserve this thing because we have been working so hard.

 

A big reason for why we may purchase something, however, is that we want to impress someone else. We want to make others think something specific about who we are, even if that isn’t exactly true. We want to be impressive, we want to be seen as cool, and we want to impress others, but we can’t always do so directly. It is hard to impress other people with direct shows of how awesome we are, and in many ways (in the United States at least) we have norms which frown upon direct bragging or obvious show-off behaviors. Subtle signaling through purchases, through physique, and through charity help us show-off in socially acceptable ways.

 

What is really interesting about the quote above is how much we try to make our signaling appear effortless. With being socially cool and desirable, a big piece is making it appear natural. Trying too hard counteracts the signaling we are doing with our purchases because it violates the norms against making obvious efforts to show off. We don’t impress people when they know we are trying to impress them as well as we impress people when it just happens to be a by product of our natural behavior. To that end, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what will impress people and how to do that thing in a way that will appear to others as if it were natural and easy. We want to be cool, but we can’t be seen trying to be cool.

Believing You Are Doing Right When Doing Wrong

Posted on by jabittan
A trait we all share as human beings is the ability to rationalize our actions and find fitting excuses for our decisions, priorities, shortcomings, habits, and behaviors. We can take the worst part of ourselves and put a positive spin on it, explaining away the negativity or at least explaining why we are justified in our wrongdoing. Ta-Nehisi Coats looks at this human ability in terms of racism in his book Between The World and Me.

 

Coats quotes Solzhenitsyn and writes, “‘We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any,’ writes Solzhenitsyn. ‘To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.’ This is the foundation of the Dream—its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works.”

 

In the passage above, Coats refers to The Dream as the false history and false memory of our nation’s founding, of slavery, and of our nation’s reconstruction following the Civil War. The Dream is not any one particular thing, but a set of experiences and life expectations afforded to white people in America but historically denied to African Americans. At the turn of the 20th century The Dream was denied to African American’s based on a false understanding of biology, genetics, and race, and allowed stereotypes to mascaraed as evidence based truths, lodging deep within our countries consciousness and as Coats would argue, still affecting us today.

 

We do not see overt racism very often in the United States today and it is generally quickly condemned by all. With overt segregation behind us, it is easy to assume that we have opened the doors of opportunity to all, and to assume that our success as an individual was no more likely than the success of any other person. We all had to make good decisions along our path and we all had to fight through obstacles with a sense of pride. Surely if we could do it, then so could any other person. Our focus on ourselves and the challenges we surmounted blind us to the reality that other people did not have the support, the starting point, and the random good luck that we had. What Coats refers to as The Dream is a set of circumstances that provide opportunities to some (opportunities that are hard to see) and criticizes those who do not achieve the same level of success without also having the same opportunities.

 

We think that what we are doing is good and just, but we are failing to recognize the ways in which we are maintaining division within society. We explain away our failure to act to help people by focusing on the sacrifices we had to make, on the frugal decisions we made with our money, and on the challenges we overcame. We do not see how our jokes, our inability to act, and our hidden acts of segregation (hiding behind economic household segregation) change the lives and opportunities of others.

 

This way of thinking allows systems to operate with unjust consequences and outcomes for racial minorities. Our human mind finds ways to take the blame off us and to place it on others who suffer, face greater challenges without support, and have historically been discriminated against. The act of recognizing the opportunities afforded to us but not others, and the act of recognizing how much we would struggle in another person’s shoes without the same opportunities is quite humbling, and takes away the facade of The Dream that Coats describes. Ultimately though, if we cannot recognize our self-interest and our brain’s ability to manipulate how we describe our self-interest, we will never reach a point where we are more just in our actions and decisions.