How We Protect Ourselves

Psychologists over the last few decades have had a great deal of fun demonstrating how irrational we generally are.  This arises from our evolutionary development and the need, as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman puts it, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, to see the world coherently—we see it in a way that makes sense to us, enabling us to survive the world’s dangers.

This can lead to important mistakes, though.  We tend to see patterns when chance is at play; we attribute characteristics to people or places or things based on incomplete information; and we protect our understandings, particularly about how the world works, despite new information.

The names Kahneman (and others) give to these three biases—and they’ve found dozens more—are What You See Is What Is (WYSIWI), the Halo Effect, and Confirmation Bias.  Let me illustrate them in turn.
When we see patterns where they don’t really exist, when we make unjustified connections between events, we are drawing conclusions with insufficient information.

Gary Smith, author of Standard Deviations, reports on how an octopus was supposed to predict winners of the 2010 World Cup Soccer matches.  He announced his prediction by eating from a plastic box marked by the flag of his predicted winner, usually Germany.  Closer investigation disclosed that the invertebrate was really attracted to the brightness of the German flag, not the analytics of the German soccer team.  It couldn’t have hurt that the German team is always in the higher ranks of the sport, so the two chances together led a few to assign mysterious foresight to the Inkster.

Not investigating apparent patterns, including causal links, leads us to all sorts of questionable thinking.  We had a cold, snow-filled winter; therefore, global warming must be a myth.  Black men are over-represented in the prison population; therefore, they are inherently dangerous.  The free market encourages gross economic and social inequalities; therefore, it should be abolished.

Taking these cognitive leaps is easy.  Understanding that there are rational explanations why the conclusions don’t follow the premises requires skeptical inquiry, something we don’t often have the self-discipline or background knowledge to resort to.

Instead, it’s simpler to decide that What We See (on the surface) Is What Is.
Similarly, when you like something about a person (or place or thing), you will likely assume other characteristics are also admirable, even though you may not have any actual evidence for this conclusion.  You might think someone highly intelligent and assume she’s also generous, when in fact she might well be self-centered and cruel.  Or worse.  Who would have ever suspected that beautiful actress Lori Loughlin could be a criminal?

Kahneman confesses to halo effect guilt when grading student essays when he was a young professor.  He typically required students to answer two questions.  When they produced a strong answer to the first question but a weak answer to the second, he often gave the student the benefit of the doubt and graded their work higher than they deserved, something he withheld from students who reversed the thoroughness of the responses.  Detecting this eventually, he implemented strategies to split the two answers and keep students’ names off the actual answers.

First impressions are key to the strength of the halo effect, which can cover up numerous sins.

Finally, our tendency to only listen to information that defends our closely held notions about the world has been confirmed frequently.  Tobias Greitemeyer, for instance, has published a study through PLOS in which college students were given a short survey on whether video games caused avid players to be violent.  They were then given two summaries of fictional studies to read, one criticizing the notion, the other agreeing with it.  Students found their beliefs reinforced by the article that defended their original opinion.  The contrary information was ignored.  Consequently, presenting both sides of the debate actually caused the two groups’ opinions to become even more polarized.  Any temptation to moderation was squelched, apparently.  Bad news for “fair and balanced.”

Why should you care?  For two reasons.  You want to be aware of your own biases in order to avoid filtering out important information about how the world works.  The snap judgment that may have protected Neanderthal from a saber-toothed tiger might cause a policeman to shoot an unarmed black man.  It may fool us into emulating a beautiful person who is dishonest.  It may induce us to support a political candidate or program that in fact aims at goals opposed to our values.

And as a person writing to persuade, it challenges you to find ways to overcome your reader’s inherent biases.  Begin by realizing that simply dumping facts on her is unlikely to move her.

Find premises that you both have in common.  This approach goes all the way back to Socrates.  If you are writing to persuade conservatives, for example, start with the notion of freedom, and show how freedom can mandate a chain of reasoning that you advocate.  Much will depend, of course, on how you define “freedom.”  Do a little reading to find out.  If, instead, you are writing for liberals, you begin by advocating social justice and work your way from there to the conclusion you wish to reach that is consistent with the premise.  You will always be guilty of oversimplifying in making assumptions about you’re your audience thinks.  There is no help for this except better knowledge.  Knowing your audience’s base framework is obviously useful with this approach.

You also must frame arguments in a way that doesn’t directly challenge your reader’s world view, but that instead challenge the logic chain from premise to outcome.  Showing the absurdity of a position by taking it to its logical extreme, what is called reduction ad absurdum, is one way.  Describing what the future will look like if the opposite path to yours is taken, a “future fact” perspective.  Avoid exaggeration, though, or you’ll fall into the “slippery slope” fallacy.  Explaining what consequences will result that your audience will want to avoid.  Drawing an analogy that explores the weaknesses of the opposing position and the advantages of your own.

These are just a few approaches that you might take to flank a reader’s defense mechanisms and get them to take you seriously.

Knowing how self-limiting we all are should, above all, give you a sense of your own as well as others’ limitations and a humility when pressing any argument on someone else, be it a teacher, a friend, parent, or stranger.  That humility should lead you to respect your opponents before you consider their views.  As Aristotle recognized long ago, our credibility often hinges on our generosity toward our opponents more than our encyclopedic knowledge or rhetorical sophistication.