(This post is inspired by author and Harvard Professor Steven Pinker’s latest book “Enlightenment Now”. I highly recommend it)
Humans con themselves with astounding frequency. To say it another way, our minds are constantly fooling us. Scientists have documented (over and over and over again) an astounding number of irrational cognitive biases that reliably cloud our thinking, cause us to misinterpret the world around us, and therefore unduly influence our lives in hidden and insidious ways. These biases cause us to make poor decisions that adversely impact ourselves and our loved ones. But more disturbingly, these biases render us susceptible to mass psychological manipulation by politicians and other sociopaths. Clear seeing is impossible when cognitive biases hold sway.
One example is the Optimism Bias and Negativity Bias dichotomy. When people all over the world are asked whether they expect their individual, personal lives to be better or worse over the next decade, an overwhelmingly large percentage (much more than is justified by chance or evidence) say that expect their personal lives to improve. However, when scientists rephrase the question to ask whether SOCIETY as a whole will become better or worse over the next decade, the bias invariably reverses—an overwhelming majority (much, much, much more than is justified by chance or by the evidence) of people believe that society will become progressively WORSE over time. This finding has held true regardless of decade or culture. It seems that humans are hard-wired for the cognitive dissonance exposed by these two biases.
Troublingly, the Negativity Bias isn’t just prospective. It also works retrospectively, meaning that, with rare exception, humans believe that society is worse off today than it was a generation or more ago. At a societal level, humans tend to romanticize the past and fear the future.
As a result of this Negativity bias, all the advantages of human progress—improved healthy life expectancies, plummeting rates of violence and genocide across the world (a well documented trend has persisted for hundreds if not thousands of years!), 100-fold declines in infant mortality, the fall of tyrants and the triumph of democracy, dramatically reduced working hours, the near elimination of famines and hunger (thanks to use of much despised pesticides, fertilizer, etc.), the elimination of deadly and disfiguring diseases (via vaccines and other medicines developed by “Big Pharma”), treatments for erectile dysfunction (my personal fave!), etc., etc., etc.—are overlooked or minimized. As a result, we fail to enjoy and appreciate the spectacular specialness of our present moment here on earth and have insufficient empathy for the comparatively tragic lives lived by our ancestors.
Said another way, we live a quality of life that every other known generation of human history would consider magical and almost utopian, but we are unable to truly enjoy our abundance. By any objective measure we should be wallowing in gratitude, but instead our minds seize upon the some troubling side effects of our incredible progress—overpopulation (a natural consequence of lower infant mortality and longer life expectancies), increased rates of cancer (a normal and expected by-product of dramatically increased life expectancies), environmental concerns, potential adverse side-effects of our miraculous medicines, etc., etc., etc. Our minds then build these side effects up to ridiculous proportions, completely forgetting that they are SIDE EFFECTS of solving much, much bigger problems that plagued humanity for all of known history. And we then convince ourselves that human civilization is ultimately doomed unless...unless...well, unless some great, visionary leader (read: manipulative demagogue) gains control and forcibly rights these wrongs by rewriting laws.
In this way cognitive biases make us susceptible to psychological and political manipulation. By exploiting this Negatively Bias, politicians (like Trump) are able to demand and obtain oppressive and intrusive new powers over us. By persuading the public that crime is out of control, that ISIS is at our doorstep, and that the world far less safe than in the “good ole days” of yore, politicians obtain power.
And yet, if we would only employ a little critical thinking, these politicians would be instantly exposed for the con men that they are. Today’s world is NOT less safe. Not even close. Not even remotely close! By EVERY single objective measure (murder rates, kidnappings, rapes, violent crimes in general, property crimes, war deaths, genocides, bullying, automobile deaths, accidental deaths, etc.), the world is safter today than at any other known time in human history, and by FAR. And it was safer last century than the one before. And that century was far safer than the one before it. Don’t believe me? The evidence is abundant, essentially uncontroverted, and readily available. Look it up! Or, better yet, read “Enlightenment Now” or “The Better Angels of our Nature” where Harvard Professor Steven Pinker has both collected much of the evidence for you and discredited arguments to the contrary. But it’s not just Pinker who has noted this. Scientist from multiple disciplines who has studied the matter (anthropologist, criminologists, sociologists, demographers, etc.) have come to exactly the same conclusion.
And yet we believe the opposite. How is this possible? Quite simply, the Negatively Bias. And, alas, this Negatively Bias is just one of a great many others that scientists have documented. Some of the better known ones are summarized here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
So, if we don’t want to be conned by our own minds—or worse by sociopathic, demagoguing politicians who expertly exploit our unconscious biases—then how do we protect ourselves? Quite simply our only defense is CRITICAL THINKING. And the foundation of critical thinking is intellectual skepticism—a dogged reluctance to accept ANYTHING as “true” (no matter how intuitively appealing or emotionally pleasing) unless its intuitive veracity is confirmed by reason, logic and observation. Only disciplined critical thinking can protect us from self-deceit.
Some of my dear friends have inaccurately suggested that reliance upon reason, logic and observation somehow diminishes the important role of intuition in our lives. This need not (and should not) be true. Intuition is critically important to progress. Were it not for intuition, old, outdated models would never be challenged. Progress would stall.
But progress continues when intuition informs critical thinking and vice versa. Knowledge is expanded when an intuitive hunch or gut instinct is verified and validated by science. When both intuition and critical thinking agree, the odds of getting conned approach zero. By contrast, to choose sides when they contradict is to expose oneself to the influence of these cognitive biases.
When we evolve to the point that we can see through our own cognitive biases via disciplined critical thinking, we’ll start to get the friends and politicians that we want. Until then, we’ll continue to get the friends and politicians that we deserve (as we have for so, so long).