Human Governance and Critical Thinking, Part 3

In Part 1 of this discussion, Human Governance and Critical Thinking, Part 1, we introduced the idea of critical thinking and it's relation to cognitive bias. In Part 2, Human Governance and Critical Thinking, Part 2, we discussed some models of and components of critical thinking; scientific method, statistics, and logic.

In today's installment, we will examine WHY it is that humans don't utilize these methods in their decision-making.

What happens when reality clashes with deeply held cognitive biases? The answer is cognitive dissonance. This dissonance is a mental stress. There is an argument that some cognitive biases are the result of a person's internal struggle to reduce that mental stress. For example, we can look at “normalcy bias” or “the ostrich effect” to see that people will ignore facts that contradict their personal biases.

Now that we know what cognitive biases are, where do cognitive biases come from? Let's return to the idea of survival needs and social needs. Cognitive biases develop to satisfy those needs, and there are evolutionary reasons for bias. Haselton, Nettle, and Murray (2014) http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton/unify_uploads/files/evolution%20of%20cognitive%20bias%20for%20Buss%20handbook%202E%20final.pdf , argues that although it would seem that cognitive biases would work against human survival due to the departure from accurate data gathering and analysis, that instead cognitive biases arose as mental short cuts. These short cuts allow humans to avoid the hard work of thinking. This is not a wise crack; if you only look at the things we've discussed so far, you will see that when making decisions, we have to think burdened by our own biases, the biases of the people we live with, and the possibility that the data we are working with is bad. And we still have a lot of obstacles to critical thinking that we haven't even looked at in this discussion. It is not surprising that humans use short cuts in thinking. In fact, when these short cuts produce successful results, we call them heuristics instead of cognitive biases. There are scientists that study the filed of heuristics and cognitive biases as a single process.

Moving past cognitive bias, other human traits can interfere with good decision making.

Why do people argue over governing methods and policies even when the facts are obvious?
Philosopher Michael Huemer has an answer. Why People Are Irrational about Politics. Huemer claims that people are irrational about politics. He argues that it is not mistakes in understanding policy (miscalculation), ignorance of the subjects involved, or even different underlying values that make for political disagreement. Huemer goes on to explain that “The beliefs that people want to hold are often determined by their self-interest, the social group they want to fit into, the self-image they want to maintain, and the desire to remain coherent with their past beliefs.” Huemer raises the point of self-interest. Looking back at all we have looked at so far, how much do you think that the idea of self-interest plays into cognitive bias and logical fallacy? Keep the idea of self-interest in your mind as we continue.

Huemer also brings up the “theory of Rational Ignorance”. This theory suggests that folks make a rational to remain ignorant of facts because the “costs of collecting information are greater than the expected value of the information”. This is parallel to Haselton et al who speak of greater mental cost in analyzing information.

Cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and irrational behavior can explain can explain some poor decision making in human activity, especially in governance, but a specific cognitive bias will move us to a discussion about human stupidity. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which a person with a lower ability in an area of competence has the belief that they can perform a task above that ability. The transition comes form the idea that a person with a low ability in decision-making can reasonably be called stupidity. Stupidity is not necessarily a result of a low IQ.

Let's start the discussion about stupidity with Cipolla, a historical economist. His humorous essay, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, was initially passed out to his friends as a present, However, this essay was shared out to many others, and Tettamanzi and Pereira state that many regard the essay as a “real work of genius”.

These are Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:

• 1- Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
• 2 - The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
• 3 - A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
  Steve's note - An assumption of the Third Law is that humans are grouped into categories of Helpless, Intelligent, Bandit, and Stupid. These categories are defined by Cipolla as a matrix of gain/loss to others and self. The Helpless loses while others gain, the Intelligent gain while others gain, the Bandit gains while others lose, and the Stupid lose while others lose
• 4- Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
• 5 - A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
• Corollary- A stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager ( a bandit).

Tettamanzi and Pereira (2014) use an agent-based simulation to demonstrate emergent behaviors that fall in with Cipolla's Laws. While they don't claim to prove Cipolla's Laws, they do take a step in the direction of establishing hypotheses to reconcile Ciolla's work with well established theory.

Stupidly goes beyond irrationality. Huemer's discussion notes that it may be in a persons interest to be irrational from time to time. Likewise, the choice to be stupid is not always as stupid as you would think it be. Prettyfedup.com http://www.prettyfedup.com/pfu/philosophical/whyarepeoplesostupid.htm has a detailed discussion about the idea of human stupidity. I will summarize the points, but I urge you to read the site itself.

• Reason #1: Stupidity works; evolution does not select for intelligence, evolution selects for survival. Stupid people breed ( in large numbers). Humans developed a social brain to help us survice as a species. The socil brain does not make decisions based upon data, but rather upon what other people do and say, with the purpose of fitting in as a social being.
  Steve's note – I wanted to restate a major point here; it is the human ability to socialize (not in the leftist sense) to get things accomplished, and the thing that is most important to get done is survival.
• Reason #2: Other People Aren't Stupid - But You Are. Although we look on others' stupidly and feel pain because our brain notes that stupid thing that was done is NOT what we should do. This is often a emotional reaction. Your rational brain tries to find a rational reason for the other person's stupidity, and you get frustrated because there was no reason for the stupidity. Then you get stupid from the frustration
  However, we don't see the reason because we are not the person that committed the stupidity. That person is acting under different situation and with different motives than we are.
• Reason #3: It's not that you're stupid...you're just stupid. Why is that so? Its that you don't understand what you failed at? Prejudice and the associated cognitive biases can be looked at as a evolutionary social reaction; because social groups need to survive. This leads to the “Us versus them” paradigm.

Although it is frustrating to put up with other people's “stupidity”, and with the lack of rational decision making, you need to understand these are the results of the normal human situation.. Reacting in an emotional manner to these realities will interfere with your own ability to think critically.

The next essay will conclude this discussion by relating what we have looked at to governance.