Seven weeks ago I agreed to help a relative ramp up their business. It’s been enjoyable but the project has been time intensive and energy intensive. I thought I could continue the newsletter by simplifying and shortening the posts. What I found is that even with a reduced load the newsletter is impacting my project and the newsletter isn’t meeting my standards.

Reluctantly, I’m suspending the newsletter for at least a few months. I may post the occasional note or comment, but no regular posting of essays. I’ve suspended payments from ‘paid subscribers’, so there will be no new charges until this newsletter can start up again.

Thank you for your support. If you remain subscribed, you will be notified when content starts again.

Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

We are the descendants of thousands of generations of people who guarded their reputations to remain within the safety of a tribe. As each generation aged, their fertility and strength waned but their knowledge and experience still made them valuable to the tribe.

It should be of no surprise that people today are reluctant to admit they don’t have an informed opinion.

Using another analogy, Haidt suggests that human minds are more comparable to lawyers and public relations consultants than they are to scientists who “objectively” seek the truth, whatever the implications of the conclusion. Our minds are well-adapted to providing post hoc justifications or explanations for the moral convictions, “intuitions” that we already possess. …

The bottom line is we are emotional actors who act (or respond) first from intuition, and only after the fact of our response do we work overtime to procure rational justification.

When our mind doesn’t have an immediate answer to a question, the subconscious is prone to take over and respond with an intuition, an intuitive response. If challenged, the brain then manufactures a rational, rather than admitting having given a “half-assed” answer. This is our ancient programming attempting to preserve our reputation.

This genetic adaptation is losing its usefulness in our modern, data-driven world. Facts are more readily checked. If we state something of consequence that is incorrect, then our reputation is harmed. We may not be thrown out of a tribe, but we might not get that next promotion or that glowing recommendation.

Stating “I don’t know” or “I haven’t formed an opinion on that” feels like a mistake to say, but it’s a relatively rare admission that actually raises other’s perceptions of your integrity and honesty. Being willing to admit ignorance on a subject has the added benefit of not getting caught in a misstatement.

Only 4% of the respondents indicated they were right less than half of the time, and only 14% said they were right half of the time. The vast majority—a whopping 82%—reported that, when they disagreed with other people, they were usually the one who was right!

Another benefit to being willing to admit ignorance is, ironically, an increased likelihood of being correct. It’s because intellectual humility causes the individual to look for the correct answer instead of assuming they already have it.

In another study in which participants read sentences about controversial topics, intellectually humble participants spent more time reading sentences that expressed viewpoints counter to their own opinions than participants low in intellectual humility, suggesting that they were thinking more deeply about ideas with which they disagreed. (Low and high intellectual humility participants didn’t differ in the time they spent reading sentences consistent with their attitudes.) Along the same lines, a study by Tenelle Porter and Karina Schumann found that people higher in intellectual humility were more interested in understanding the reasons that people disagree with them. 

Early on in my consulting career I learned the power of “I don’t know, but I’ll find out and get back to you.” It invariably led to the clients trusting me more which led to higher adherence to my recommendation. If a problem arose at a client’s, they were less likely to blame their consultant.

Intellectual humility also turns out to be a very powerful tool for organizational leaders:

Effective leaders are able to set a vision and direction, get others to buy into this vision and mobilize them to produce the change required to achieve this vision. None of this requires having all the answers. Yet, many people’s idea of a leader involves someone who has foresight and insight - someone who is able to see what others don’t. This can often translate to never saying “I don’t know.”…

Knowledge is important. But overestimating the importance of having all the answers (or the belief that you already possess them) can quiet your curiosity to explore all the facets of a topic with a fresh, learning focused mindset.

And…

Recognizing one’s ignorance and intellectual fallibility are core features of intellectual humility. Intellectually humbler people seem to be more curious and better liked as leaders, and tend to make more thorough, well informed decisions. Intellectually humbler people also seem to be more open to cooperating with those whose views differ from their own. These habits of mind could be vital for confronting many of the challenges facing societies today, and beneficial to laypeople, policy makers and scientists (Box 1).

It takes practice to stop the reflexive reaction of providing a poorly informed answer. It’s important to adopt the moral value that admitting not having all the answers is a greater virtue than pretending otherwise, and remembering to pause before answering a question to give the cognitive brain a chance to process what was asked.

Finale

Adapting a policy of intellectual humility is one of the greatest “hacks” I can give anyone for their professional and personal advancement. It’s a reputation builder as well as a tool for improving your leadership and understanding. Give yourself permission to not be “all knowing” — because none of us are.

To support this newsletter please like and comment below. Don’t forget to recommend us to your friends and family. Have a great week!

Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

We all have our biases. They may not be harmful or insulting, but as we discussed in our Foundation essays the amount of information the human brain has to process requires mental shortcuts to handle the data. Most of the time our biases are inconsequential and speed decision making.

Biases, like any mental shortcut, means that we are not analyzing all the available information when making a decision. That’s not a problem when selecting an item off a restaurant menu, but it can have an enormous negative impact when making decisions that affect the future of a business or other people’s lives.

When we disagree with others, being blind to our own biases can set into motion what Pronin and Hazel (2023) call a “spiral of conflict.” Both parties in a disagreement tend to view their adversaries as biased and irrational and themselves as unbiased and rational (Kennedy & Pronin, 2008), but little progress or diplomacy is possible unless people become attuned to their own biases.

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The Difficulty of Recognizing Our Blind Spots

Ideally, we recognize that we have biases and we choose to not reflexively go with them when the potential consequences of a decision are significant. You’d think this would be easy but mental shortcuts are stubborn things. If they don’t cause personal harm, and sometimes even when they do, the brain repeats their use for efficiency’s sake. This typically happens at the subconscious level and goes unrecognized by the slower, conscious mind.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon ran a study with 661 participants to measure the effects of bias blind spots. Averages being what they are, you’d expect half of the participants to state that they are more biased than others and half to say that they are less biased than others. Only 1 of the 661 participants said they were more biased than others. What we can deduce from this is that almost all of us don’t recognize the extent of our biases.

Blind Spots in the Work Place

We’ve all heard stories, or even lived them ourselves, when a doctor missed a diagnosis, particularly in a hectic environment. When the brain sees a similar set of symptoms 30 times straight and the root cause for each case is the same, the brain will quickly assume the 31st time these symptoms show up in a patient that the cause is also the same.

It’s not just doctors. We cannot turn off our blind spots. Our brains must make 35,000 decisions a day and there isn’t enough time in the day to consciously examine every decision looking for a blind spot. Mechanics, teachers, parents, military leaders, politicians, and business leaders all have blind spots regarding our biases. As do we.

Preventing Blind Spots

We can counterbalance our bias blind spots by openly listening to others with different opinions.

Which brings us back to editor Ernst Cramer, who also liked to tell the story of how he was first hired by legendary German publisher Axel Springer. The two men had a meeting at Springer’s Berlin office that, in Cramer’s view, did not go very well at all. It seems there was a serious bone of contention, a rather vehement disagreement on a political issue that went back and forth between the two for some time. Neither was willing to relent.

Later that day, Cramer received a call asking him to return to meet with Springer again. The publisher greeted the young editor with the announcement, “Cramer, you’re hired.” The somewhat stunned Cramer reminded Springer that the two had spent half their time that morning in very spirited debate, to which Springer replied: “Exactly – that’s why I need you on the team!”

We can practice challenging our own assumptions about situations.

I often say to the MBA cohorts that I mentor that they need to challenge the implicit assumption in the material they read and validate for themselves whether that assumption is true or not. Doing this builds critical reasoning capability. This is a great habit to perfect for screening any information that comes our way because it acts as a safeguard against passive acceptance and possible ignorance.

The Role of Leadership

As leaders, whether it be in our family, our workplace, or in our social groups it is important to foster a culture that allows for polite disagreement and acceptance of differing opinions. A culture of deference to the leader’s opinions can have drastic consequences. (A phenomenon frequently seen in authoritarian governments.)

Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S.

But Boeing and Airbus design modern, complex airplanes to be flown by two equals. That works beautifully in low-power-distance cultures [like the U.S., where hierarchies aren't as relevant]. But in cultures that have high power distance, it's very difficult.

Implicit Bias

Let’s take a brief detour into implicit bias as it’s often confused with the bias blind spots. In the broadest definition, which I prefer, implicit bias is the natural bias toward our in-groups; which we’ve discussed in other essays. We can certainly have a bias blind spot around an in-group bias but not all bias blind spots revolve around in-group bias. As a side note, I would be cautious with any news report or study revolving around implicit bias. A number of highly publicized implicit bias studies have later been found to have methodological flaws and/or weren’t replicable.

Finale

Having biases are a necessary element of being alive. Where it can bite us is when we don’t take into account that we have biases that might eventually become harmful to ourselves or others. We can counter this by listening to differing opinions to search out flaws and missing pieces in our own assumptions. Fostering this habit in ourselves and in our groups leads to better decision making.

To support this newsletter please like and comment below. Don’t forget to recommend us to your friends and family. Have a great week!

Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

We’ve all heard something along the lines of “When in doubt, trust your gut”, but is this good advice? The answer is “it depends”.

For the purposes of our discussion, the brain has two main decision pathways. The first is the fast/subconscious/experiential/emotional pathway and the second is the slow/conscious/analytical/logical pathway. (These are the more common terms used to describe these pathways.)

There is a bias in western educated culture to heavily favor analysis and logic in decision making; sometimes to the point of expecting all decisions to be ‘logical’. This pathway is also slow and prone to logical fallacies. It’s making decisions with imperfect, incomplete information and it sometimes ‘gets it wrong’.

Researchers estimate we make 35,000 decisions a day and our slow decision pathway can’t handle that load alone. We can’t properly function without offloading most of our decision making to our fast/subconscious/experiential/emotional pathway. By the way, it’s the fast pathway that decides which decision pathway to use.

Our fast decision pathway relies heavily on a simple good/bad emotional take that it has tied to images and situations. (Not a lot is known about this process, as neurobiological research is still in its early stages on this subject.) Psychology refers to this as the ‘affect heuristic’ and it influences several named biases.

In psychology, the affect heuristic is a mental shortcut that people use to make decisions that are heavily influenced by what they’re currently feeling. Essentially, your affect (a psychological term for emotional response) plays a critical role in the choices you make. …

Your feelings about the relative "goodness" or "badness" of a particular person, object, or activity influence the choices that you make about them.

Simply, a significant portion of our decision making is based on our subconscious labeling of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to different inputs in our decision making. We’ve seen this when someone is asked why they made the decision they did and they replied “I had a good feeling about them/it” or “I had a bad feeling about them/it”. In Western, educated societies where the desire to be seen making logical/analytical decisions. As part of our reputation preservation systems, this causes individuals to reflexively obscure the true decision making process by covering it with a rationalization or justification. (As explained in Steven Pinker’s elephant/rider analogy.) These justifications/rationalizations are, more times than not, stored in the brain’s memory system as a fact while not storing the emotional decision making element — we fool ourselves into believe we’re making logical decisions when they are actually emotionally driven.

This subconscious good/bad ‘tagging’ heavily affects our actions in society. It binds groups together by subconsciously tagging in-group members as ‘good’ and out-group member’s as ‘bad/not as good’. This aids group cohesion as well as driving irrational prejudice.

Societal Impacts

This effect is a powerful tool for influencing others. Someone/something being in the ‘good’ category gets favorable responses, while people and things in the ‘bad’ category get shunned/ignored. A related bias is that when we associate someone or something as likable then we assume they/it have a lower risk, which being disliked is associated with being of a higher risk.

In small groups, some individuals use gossip to strengthen their social position while weakening the influence of others (such as in the workplace or in a neighborhood).

Judicial System

The judicial system acknowledges the effect of the affect heuristic. Judges will disallow some evidence in a trial when they deem that the prejudicial factor outweighs its evidentiary benefit. Unrelated negative information can sway the juror’s fast/subconscious decision making against the individual; overriding the slow, conscious, logical decision making system that is supposed to be processing the evidence.

Marketing

Marketers have long recognized this effect. They work to associate good emotions with their company and products. Coca Cola used a jingle about teaching the “world to work in perfect harmony”. Super Bowl commercials heavily use babies, animals, and beloved celebrities to give their brand and products that warm fuzzy feeling that drives sales.

In the 2010s, marketers shifted to using social causes to generate the ‘good’ feeling that drives emotion-driven sales. The tactic worked remarkably well when their target demographic broadly agreed with their social cause. The tactic failed when their customer base had diverging opinions or when the social cause advertising was seen as disingenuous. In the 2020s, marketers are pulling back from their social cause ‘feel good’ advertisements and returning to traditional techniques for generating positive emotions about the brands or products.

Politics and News

Politics relies heavily on using emotions and good/bad dichotomies to influence voters; especially in the era of social media. Arguing policy, which engages the slow/analytical decision making pathway, doesn’t move voting behavior as much as engaging the fast/emotional decision making pathway. Anger and disgust are the two most powerful emotions for swaying opinions; which political campaigns rely heavily on.

As the news industry has become increasingly fragmented and news distribution has shifted to fast delivery via the internet, news agencies have shifted to emotional headlines and content. This drives the clicks that earns them the advertising revenue which keeps the lights on. As with politics, the anger and disgust emotions are the most powerful motivators for driving clicks. This has created a symbiotic relationship between politics and the news media which is considered by many to be a destructive force in society.

Hiring Practices

Businesses hiring practices are heavily influenced by this subconscious fast decision making process. Candidates are most likely to be hired if they have ‘good’ traits such as being tall and/or attractive. Interviewers favor candidates with whom they share commonalities such as whether they went to the same college, whether they grew up in the same area, whether they share the same activities, or whether they come from the same culture. When there are no commonalities, the unfamiliar triggers the ‘bad/negative’ vibes that lead to the candidate not making it to the next round of interviews.

Both Pathways Have Benefits and Risks

The above examples may lead you to believe that the fast/subconscious pathway is inferior and should be avoided. However the fast, efficient decision pathway makes decisions that are often ‘good enough’. More times than not, the good/bad tagging is based on an amalgam of past experiences that, while imperfect, lead to decisions that don’t harm the individual; while our slow/analytical pathway often doesn’t have the data necessary to make a better decision in the time available.

Dual process theory is a foundational theory in cognitive psychology. It suggests that humans have two distinct cognitive systems for decision-making. The first, System 1, is fast, effortless, automatic, and emotional, while the second, System 2, is slow, effortful, deliberate, and logical.

There is a common misconception that System 1, rooted in emotion, is maladaptive and always leads to poor decision-making, while System 2, rooted in reason, is superior in every way. However, as Daniel Kahneman pointed out in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, both systems have pros and cons. System 1 thinking is beneficial when there is no time to deliberate because we must make an immediate decision. This kind of automatic thinking allows us to make the instinctive choice to hit the brakes when someone cuts us off on the highway or to jump into action to perform the Heimlich maneuver on someone who is choking. In an emergency, there is no time to sit around and make a slow, effortful decision with System 2.

Finale

‘Trusting our gut’, works best when decisions have to be made immediately and the available information is limited or contradictory. ‘Thinking it through’ works best when the effects of the decision will have a significant impact and there is time to analyze the available data.

Trusting our gut fails most when a consequential decision has to made and there is time available to analyze the situation, but ‘going with your gut’ is taken because it is easier. It also fails when the decision process relies on invalid ‘bad’/‘good’ tags resulting from a bias.

I know one smart employer who uses common biases to his advantage when hiring. He will favor the candidate with the unconventional appearance or experience as they likely had hidden traits that allowed them to succeed despite their social disadvantage. He reports having strong success with this hiring philosophy.

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, for example, found that in the months following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, Americans were less likely to travel by plane and more likely to travel by car than they had been before the attacks. As a result, highway deaths increased substantially in the United States.

Why? Because even with the threat of terrorism factored in, the odds of dying in a car crash are substantially higher than the odds of dying in a plane crash. In fact, according to Gigerenzer’s analysis, the increase in highway deaths among people who chose to drive instead of fly in the months following 9/11 exceeded the number of victims in the actual attacks!

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Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

We all have those years that have an extra-large impact on our lives. For me, 1983 was one of those years. A new town, a new college, a new job, new friends, and several decisions that shaped my future.

One memory that stands out was the release of The Police’s Synchronicity album. I was well read for my age but I had not heard the term “synchronicity” before. Carl Jung had coined the German version of the word (Synchronizität). His definition changed over time but its generally understood to describe the seeming connection of two experiences with no causal relationship.

Humans are, by nature, pattern seeking and frequently see meaning in these moments of connecting unrelated experiences. Jung saw this as phenomena that supported his belief in the parapsychology. In the following years science could not verify any paranormal connection but many psychologists have found that, in mild doses, the connecting of unconnected information could be a useful adaptation tool for the brain and a useful therapeutic target.

In 1972, a Hungarian-born author, Arthur Koestler, published a book titled The Roots of Coincidence exploring parapsychology concepts (including synchronicity) and their possible usefulness in physics. The frontman of The Police, Sting, was enamored by the book; using several concepts from the book in lyrics for several songs on the Synchronicity album.

Synchronicity went on to be the band’s biggest release, selling millions of records, and earning numerous awards. It’s been voted one of the greatest rock albums of all time. It also ended up being the last studio album released by the band. The Roots of Coincidence bubbled into the pop culture, including in V is for Vendetta, but in the 50 years since physics has continued to explain with research what Koestler tried to explain with parapsychology.

Jung’s synchronicity can be, at least partially, explained by the Frequency Bias/Illusion which is also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. It’s a cognitive bias where we tend to notice matches to something thats rumbling around in our brain. You may have experienced this when you purchased a new car; suddenly you will see the same model all around you as you drive.

As we’ve discussed before, the brain has a limited capacity to take in all the information it is exposed to. To compensate, the brain ignores what it believes is irrelevant, reserving the brain’s processing for analyzing only that which has a relevance to us. This is why you don’t consciously recall seeing a vehicle model before you owned it, but do recall seeing it after your purchase. Jung and Koestler, seeking an explanation for suddenly noticing unconnected but repeating patterns, theorized there was parapsychology explanation; not as an artifact of how the brain stores and recalls information.

Despite the error, the concept of synchronicity has value. Psychologists, following up on Jung, find it useful as it gives a clue into what the mind perceives as relevant. Influenced by Jung and Koestler, The Police’s album Synchronicity went on to become one of the greatest rock albums of all times and an artistic masterpiece. And in 1983, I was introduced to one of my favorite albums of all time and first learned of the term synchronicity; which I’m now using over 40-years later to introduce the concept of a cognitive bias named the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. (Because these events are causally linked, they aren’t an example of synchronicity.)

Finale

This cognitive bias shapes our understanding of the world. We don’t notice/remember that which isn’t relevant to us, while those who do see relevance have a very different experience. We see this in many societal conflicts where Group A sees no significant problem while affected Group B sees/remembers constant reinforcements to their concerns. Some Group A members will explain the difference in perceptions as being due to irrationality, mental illness, dishonesty, and hidden motives. Some Group B members will explain the difference in perceptions due to malevolent intent, stupidity, dishonesty, and hidden motives.

In leadership, whether it be business or government, this cognitive bias can lead to missing growing problems or overestimating value and risk. The best anecdote to this bias, aside from recognizing that it exists, is to listen openly to those who describe a different perception and work to understand why the difference exists.

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Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

People are wiser when reasoning about others’ problems than when reasoning about their own problems. In addition, our results demonstrate that self-distancing reduces this asymmetry in wise reasoning.

Remember the times that a friend or loved one was struggling with a problem, yet the path they needed to take was obvious? Certainly, we may be missing some factor that is complicating the decision, but there is research indicating that the brain is better at solving other people’s problems than it is at solving our own. The greater our self interest in the problem, the poorer the advice to ourselves becomes.

A couple of weeks ago my daughter called telling me that she was at the veterinary hospital with her adorable and extremely loved cat, Henry. She had picked him up and noticed that a paw was cold. While Henry was being examined she called me and I drove to the hospital for support. The doctor came back with bad news — Henry’s heart wasn’t functioning properly and it was causing blood clots that had affected the blood flow to his paw.

The doctor advised her that the only medical treatment available was 70 miles away at a veterinary college. The cost could be as much as $7000 and, if the surgery was successful, the prognosis still wasn’t going to be good. My daughter was overwhelmed with emotion and asked me what she should do.

You may be thinking that I told her what to do and then the decision was made. No, I did not. My making the decision for her would weaken her agency in the situation and could result in long term regrets. What I did tell her is that she should imagine a friend who was in the same situation and ask herself what advice she would give.

After a few quiet minutes, and much crying, my daughter made the compassionate decision to say goodbye. With the decision made, the doctor let my daughter know that she used to do these surgeries and that, in her experience, the right decision was made for Henry.

Just as we are often better at giving advice to others than ourselves. We are better at giving ourselves advice if we self-distance by imagining what advice we would give a friend. This works remarkably well.

More broadly, our findings suggest that decision making about assigning individuals to advisory roles in domains that involve social dilemmas (e.g., management, intergroup negotiations) may benefit from considering whether the decision makers’ and possible advisors’ self- interests are involved. If so, their reasoning may be biased. Self-interests are often unavoidable; people regularly make decisions about situations in which they have personal stakes (e.g., business negotiations, relationship transactions, or health-related decisions). The current findings, in conjunction with prior research (Kross & Grossmann, 2012), suggest that self-distancing may provide people with a tool to enhance wise reasoning under such consequential circumstances.

This also applies to business. The more self-interest the advice giver has (career prospects, promotions, career risk, etc.) the lower the quality of advice on average. Business owners often have business friends they talk with about business problem, but line managers may not have professional peers outside of coworkers that they can go to for advice (and in many business cultures doing so would be seen as violating the confidentiality expectations).

This problem is compounded in business cultures where employees can expect to their career prospects to be harmed by their mistakes. Instead of seeking advice, they hide problems and blame others to protect themselves. Expecting perfection from employees actually increases errors and their negative effects on the organization.

Finale

Don’t let pride prevent you from seeking the advice of others; whether it be from friends, therapists, or peers. If you are in a leadership role, create a culture where others don’t fear consequence for seeking second opinions or for making normal human mistakes. When your path is uncertain and you don’t have a reliable and knowledgeable person to rely on for advice , you can always ask yourself what you would tell a friend in the same situation.

To support this newsletter please like and comment below. Don’t forget to recommend us to your friends and family. Have a great week!

Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

Our senses inform our behavior. A study published in Science (2010) found that sitting in a hard chair was associated with how hard they flexible they were when negotiating.

Among participants who made a second offer, hard chairs indeed produced less change in offer price (M = $896.5, SD = $529.6) than did soft chairs (M= $1243.6, SD = $775.9), F(1, 66) = 4.30, P = 0.042. Controlling for whether people reported wanting to buy a car in the next year strengthened this effect, F(1, 65) = 6.95, P = 0.010. Thus, hardness produces perceptions of strictness, rigidity, and stability, reducing change from one’s initial decisions, even when the touch experience is passive in nature. These findings highlight the metaphorical specificity of haptic priming effects: Instead of changing the overall valence of evaluations, hard objects made others seem both more negative (strict and rigid) and more positive (stable), with corresponding effects on decision-making.

Another study in Science (2008) found that offering a warm beverage to another might have interpersonal benefits. Study participants who held a warm beverage estimated a stranger’s personality to be warmer than when the participant was holding a cold beverage.

A 2012 study found that having to look up at someone made them look more powerful. This was true for objects as well; they seemed more powerful when viewed at an upward angle.

Not only the hardness of a chair affects the sitter, a paper from 2012 found that smaller uncomfortable chairs lowered the effective power of the person in the chair.

Of course there is more to negotiations than the tactile. Culture has a tremendous influence as to how negotiations are handled. The World Economic Forum has put together this primer on negotiating differences between countries.

"Determining national characteristics is treading a minefield of inaccurate assessment and surprising exception. There is, however, such a thing as a national norm," he writes. …

Americans lay their cards on the table and resolve disagreements quickly with one or both sides making concessions. …

Indonesians tend to be very deferential conversationalists, sometimes to the point of ambiguity.

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Finale

I’m going to be experimenting with some different formats, lengths, and publishing schedules the next few weeks. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss anything.

To support this newsletter please comment and share. Don’t forget to recommend us to your friends and family. Have a great week!

Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

I’ve noticed a troubling pattern emerge among popular science-related sources on the internet. As their popularity grows, so does extremist reactions. Some followers are idolizing the source and fail to see the shortfalls and limitations. Conversely, some followers take great joy in knocking down the idols while failing to see the virtues of the source. The resulting conflict between these two groups ends up poisoning what would be useful scientific debate.

This becomes relevant as this page now shifts from broad foundational newsletters on human behavior to tighter discussions on specific topics. As we travel on this journey together we should embrace that there are flaws and virtues in all (honest) source materials. The areas where not everyone agrees are the most educational and present the most opportunity for personal growth.

This newsletter contains errors

In previous issues we covered how little information we are exposed to, how little we perceive, how little we remember, and how imperfect our recollection is. These are human traits that affect of us and our creative efforts — including this newsletter.

I will make mistakes, the sources I reference will make mistakes, and sometimes the perceived accuracy depends on the assumptions being made by the writer and reader are similar.

Underlying this is our imperfect and fractured language. Academia tries to get around the language problem by utilizing highly specific language for advanced topics or papers. This never fully resolves all the issues as different schools may use terminology slightly different.

I ran into this a few weeks ago when I wrote about how the brain processes memories. Different programs/authors favored different frameworks for how memories worked in humans. Even when the same phenomena was being explained, the definitions and terminology would vary. When writing about this I settled on language I thought would best help the non-academian to understand the broad concept, though it might irritate those wallowing deep in the details.

While academia attempts to be rigorous with their language, colloquial language use on scientific issues is not rigorous as all. Colloquial language is less rigorous, but it is better understood. Whereas, academic writing is more rigorous, but it is heavily misunderstood and misinterpreted by the lay person. This is why I link to both academic papers/articles and articles written for broader audiences.

You’ll find that few of my science-related citations will link to the popular press. News articles you’ll commonly find linked to on social media are written to attract ‘clicks’, often using contrived emotions to drive interaction, but the actual research they are referencing is often quite different from what is being reported.

Mistakes are made by experts

There is a lot of great research going on, including some amazing advancements in recent years from neuroscientists (which will be referenced here frequently). There is also a lot of poor quality research being done. To progress in their fields, many academians are caught on a treadmill of frequent publishing and choosing topics that best attract attention. This has led to a lot of bad science being conducted.

It has been estimated that 85% of all research funding is actually wasted, due to inappropriate research questions, faulty study design, flawed execution, irrelevant endpoints, poor reporting and/or non-publication.

Another isssue is that much of the research we discuss here was structured around the school calendar and the availability of those conducting the research. Many of these studies are setup to be organized, conducted, and analyzed within a single college semester; causing long-term effects to be missed (and short term effects to be over emphasized).

Study subjects are often just pulled from the college’s student body; which gave rise to the acronym “W.E.I.R.D” to describe them — western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. These study subjects are also generally young; in their teens and twenties. Yet much of behavioral research is conducted with this not-very-diverse population.

Almost everything experimental psychologists believe about the human mind comes from studies of the Weird. But perhaps you've guessed the problem: from a global standpoint, Weird people may be really... what's the word? Yes: odd. As Henrich et al show, many phenomena we've assumed are universal probably aren't: we can only really say they're universal among Weird people, who make up 96% of subjects in behavioural science, or Americans, who make up 68%, and often only among US college students, who provide US researchers with a supply of guinea pigs. And the Weird, they say, "are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species"

Peer review is flawed

I won’t spend too much time discussing this now but ‘peer review’ isn’t the gold stamp that people think it is. There are only a handful of prestigious publications whose peer review process is rigorous and offers a consistent value add to the authors and the readers. There is a growing industry of ‘pay-to-publish’ academic journals that will accept almost an anything if a check is included with the submission. Many of those state that they are ‘peer reviewed’ but the rigor of those reviews are highly questionable. Read this for more on peer review problems. And this.

Right now, many people think peer review means, "This paper is great and trustworthy!" In reality, it should mean something like, "A few scientists have looked at this paper and didn't find anything wrong with it, but that doesn't mean you should take it as gospel. Only time will tell."

Of those papers that get peer reviewed and published in prestigious journals, many still contain errors and, sometimes, fraud. Errors are not easily caught. There disincentives within academia to replicate/verify results of a study and, in some cases, attempting to publish a critique of a paper written by a high-status researcher can be career threatening.

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What can we trust?

We are imperfect people living in an imperfect world that are getting by with imperfect information. Just because someone or something is imperfect that doesn’t mean they are not valuable. As long as you recognize our potential cognitive biases and avoid falling into logical fallacies (which we will frequently cover here), you can trust in your judgement. Just remember to be humble enough to be open to changing your mind.

Being humble forces us to ask, “Where do I fit—in my family or at work? How does my stance stand up to others’? Why is my country outstanding, or is it? Why does it need to be for my or my country’s ego? Why do I need to brag? How can my field work with other professions? Why do I think my values are the only ones that count?”

Putting this all together

The purpose of this newsletter is to guide you in better understanding the behavior of yourself and those around you. With better understanding comes better decisions. It’s important to remember that just as mistakes are made by everyone, including ourselves, there will be mistakes made here as well. That warning applies to everything you read. Recognizing this reality will lead to fewer and less painful mistakes in the long run.

Our goal (with very rare exceptions) should never to be perfect but to look for our errors and correct them quickly when discovered. Just as we can’t expect ourselves to be perfect, neither can we expect others to be perfect as well. Our humility needs to be paired with grace for others.

Exercises

• Remember a time when you found something you had previously read was incorrect. Why was it wrong?

• Remember a time when something you read changed your mind. Why were you open to changing your mind?

Finale

To make the most out of this newsletter, and your other reading, assume that what you read will have inaccuracies and flaws. This aids in applying what you’ve read to what you’ve experienced and learned previously. We don’t easily retain knowledge that was accepted uncritically.

I appreciate that you chose to use your valuable time to read these newsletters. Now that we’ve laid the foundation for understanding human behavior, future issues will delve into some fascinating areas of why we do what we do.

To support this newsletter please like and comment below. Don’t forget to recommend us to your friends and family. Have a great week!

Your friend,

DJ

Thank you for reading Seeing The Mountain. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Welcome!

In Why “Seeing the Mountain”, we discussed how our perspectives are limited by our experience, education, and viewpoint. Then, in You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, we discussed how little we know, take in, store, and remember. In Our Tribes And How They Shape Us, we discussed how we fill in the gaps of our knowledge and understanding through the groups we belong to. In Wisdom of the Crowd, Madness of the Mob, we discussed how those around us influence our decisions and behavior. Last week in Filling In The Blanks, we discussed how our brains fill in missing information in order to make efficient decisions.

In this issue we discuss some of the ways our brains behave imperfectly and processes the brain has to recognize and respond to its processing errors.

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The imperfect brain

The brain is a vast electrical system comprised of 120 billion brain cells that create over 100 trillion synapses.

A brain cell, or a neuron, has a large main body, with small strands sticking out. So one neuron, the transmitter, uses a really thin strand called an axon. A second neuron, the receiver, can receive contacts along its main body, or along strands that branch out like a tree, called dendrites. When the axon tip of a transmitter connects to a receiver, that’s a synapse.

Neurons run on electricity. If an electrical signal passes down an axon, its tip releases chemicals called neurotransmitters into the synapse. These neurotransmitters tell the receiver cell to either activate its own electrical charge, which sends the signal to the next neuron in the chain, or tell the receiver cell to stay quiet.

The brain isn’t static. It’s a highly dynamic system that is constantly building new mental pathways to accommodate new information and experiences, as well as to rebuild after injuries (such as those due to drugs or trauma). This ability to constantly rewire the brain is called neuroplasticity.

These pathways can involve several, if not dozens, of the regions of the brain. All this electrical activity also generates “noise” which negatively impacts signals in the brain.

Random disturbances of signals, termed ‘noise’, pose a fundamental problem for information processing and affect all aspects of nervous-system function. …

Neurons perform highly nonlinear operations that involve high gain amplification and positive feedback. Therefore, small biochemical and electrochemical fluctuations (when considering systems at the molecular level we use the term fluctuation interchangeably with noise) can significantly alter whole-cell responses. …

Noise has recently emerged as a key component of a wide range of biological systems — from gene expression⁹⁸ to heart function⁸⁹. In neuroscience, we have shown how noise is introduced at all stages of the sensorimotor loop, from the level of a single signalling protein to that of body movement. Noise has direct behavioural consequences, from setting perceptual thresholds to affecting movement precision.

The brain’s limits

Just as you have a limited aerobic capability, your cardiovascular system limits how fast and far you can run, your brain has an upper limit to how much information it can take in and process. It adapts by shuttling most of its work to highly efficient subconscious systems, by narrowing its conscious processing to what is needed for the current tasks.

The findings suggest that mental exertion and cognitive fatigue lead to an accumulation of glutamate in the lateral prefrontal cortex. This would alter brain metabolism so that more energy is devoted to restoring proper glutamate concentrations and less to non-essential tasks, such as thinking — leading to actions that require less effort and impulsive decisions that lead to short-term rewards. …

As for mental fatigue, the best treatment — regardless of cause — is taking regular breaks and sleeping well.

Error correction

Note to researchers: If you’re looking for an academic niche where you can make an impact and garner attention then investigate how individuals, groups, and societies ‘error correct’. Errors are inherently destabilizing, yet stability exists because of strategies and behaviors employed at the individual and group level. Academia has largely ignored this crucial element of human survival. There is opportunity for the young academic here.

Error recognition

In 2023, researchers in Japan identified cells in the brain that signal when a mistake was made. When those cell were switched off, the brain failed to register the mistake and the mistake was made again.

Then, using a cutting-edge brain imaging technique they identified a specific group of cells (known as D2-neurons) in the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain implicated in decision-making, that signaled when mice had made a mistake. Finally, using a genetic technique called optogenetics that allows cells to be temporarily “switched-off”, the team demonstrated that if signaling by D2-neurons was blocked during the part of the task when mice would ordinarily realize that they had made a mistake (i.e., when they discover the outcome of their decision), then mice were more likely to make the same mistake again in future.

Cognitive dissonance

The human brain issues a warning when there are internal inconsistencies — a phenomena called cognitive dissonance:

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people are averse to inconsistencies within their own minds. It offers one explanation for why people sometimes make an effort to adjust their thinking when their own thoughts, words, or behaviors seem to clash with each other.

The uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance is motivator for the individual to resolve the mental conflict (i.e. correct the error).

There are four strategies used to do reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance:

1. We change our behavior so that it is consistent with the other thought.

2. We change one of the dissonant thoughts in order to restore consistency.

3. We add other (consonant) thoughts that justify or reduce the importance of one thought and therefore diminish the inconsistency.

4. We trivialize the inconsistency altogether, making it less important and less relevant.

There are two other factors that influence the magnitude of cognitive dissonance: whether you had some choice over the inconsistency and whether you expect the inconsistency to have negative consequences in the future. The more choice you had over the inconsistency (Linder, Cooper, & Jones, 1967) and the worse the consequences (Cooper & Worchel, 1970), the stronger the dissonance will be.

When this error condition exists, we have a choice as to how we end the discomfort. We can resolve the error by reflecting on the source of the conflict and determining if our behavior violates a value, by changing the value, justifying the behavior, or ignoring the error.

The process gets short circuited when the person feeling the cognitive dissonance avoids the error correction process and lashes out at others (and sometimes themselves) to engage anger/righteous indignation to smother the dissonance. This often occurs due to insecurities and concerns about maintaining their reputation. The result is that the inconsistency is never resolved, leaving the error in place.

Stroop effect

In 1935, J. Ridley Stroop published a paper that has since spawned hundreds of studies into how the brain handles incongruent information.

The Journal of Experimental Psychology reported that Stroop’s article introducing this phenomenon was among the most cited of the articles they’ve published in their first 100 years. In 2002 as part of its centennial issue, it stated “More than 700 studies have sought to explain some nuance of the Stroop effect; thousands of others have been directly or indirectly influenced by Stroop’s article.”

Stroop’s research included tests for measuring this effect:

Regardless of these variations, all Stroop tests deal with two incongruent properties of a stimulus and a resulting delay in its cognitive processing by the brain. Eventually, the more automatic process among the two gets access to selective attention and is processed, while the other is ignored.

The processes at play are still being teased out by researchers, but we can say with some confidence that the brain kicks information that it can’t process (much like a computer error code) over to other regions of the brain for a more thorough analysis.

Kahneman wrote, “When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment.” When it comes to the Stroop effect, System 1 (our automatic, fast thinking) seeks to find the quickest pattern available. Kahneman believes by understanding how our brains make connections, we can overcome them to reach more logical conclusions by calling on System 2, our controlled thinking, quicker.

Post error adjustments

Research in the last 20 years is finding that the brain makes adjustments when it consciously encounters an error. These changes in the brain are measurable, though the mechanisms and accuracy of these changes still needs more research.

When our brain detects an error, this process changes how we react on ensuing trials. People show post-error adaptations, potentially to improve their performance in the near future. At least three types of behavioral post-error adjustments have been observed. These are post-error slowing (PES), post-error reduction of interference, and post-error improvement in accuracy (PIA). …

The behavioral findings are not unequivocal with respect to accuracy improvements after errors. Several studies demonstrated improved accuracy directly after error commission (Laming, 1968, 1979; Marco-Pallares et al., 2008; Danielmeier et al., 2011; Maier et al., 2011). Klein et al. (2007a)reported improved performance only after errors that were consciously perceived by the subject, but not after unnoticed errors. Other studies did not find any difference between post-error and post-correct error rates (cf. Experiment 1; Hajcak et al., 2003; Hajcak and Simons, 2008) or even a decrease in accuracy following errors, at least in certain experimental conditions (Rabbitt and Rodgers, 1977; Fiehler et al., 2005). Carp and Compton (2009) showed that both ERN and Pe amplitude correlate with post-error accuracy, in that larger ERN/Pe amplitudes go along with better post-error accuracy.

Errors in error correction

Our brains have conscious and subconscious processes to identify and correct errors. Even our error correction processes have failure points. The brain conserves resources by repeating what it’s done before, that can include mistakes. You’ve likely encountered this if you rearranged your kitchen and find yourself putting something back in the wrong/old place.

Another common source of error comes from the brain’s reward system. This system evolved to keep our species alive and procreating.

After the rewarding experience, the prefrontal cortex (which plays a role in decision-making and planning) assesses the entire event. It connects the pleasure from the NAc with the original stimulus and the action taken.

The stronger the pleasurable response in the NAc, the stronger the reinforcement signal sent to the prefrontal cortex and other areas responsible for memory and behavior.

As a result, the individual becomes more inclined to seek out or engage in that specific behavior or context in anticipation of the reward. Over time, through repeated exposures, this leads to learned behaviors or habits.

The reward system does its job quite effectively in times of relative scarcity. As humanity has progressed, we’ve found ways to ‘tickle’ the reward system for pleasure. For some, this has led to addictive behaviors where an unhealthy action continues despite the consequences.

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Not all errors are bad

It’s not true that we learn best from our mistakes. Research indicates that we learn more from other’s mistakes and our own successes. We flinch at fully examining the reasons for our own failures. Nevertheless, becoming skilled requires the willingness to repeatedly make mistakes as we develop new pathways in our brains to successfully wield a new skill. You’re not going to shoot par in golf until you’ve shanked hundreds of balls.

“The findings suggest that learning may not require the changing of connections of neurons on each trial, as several other studies have suggested, and instead suggest that information about outcomes on each trial are held in a sort of buffer for guidance in the next attempt,” says Professor Howard Eichenbaum from the Centre for Memory and Brain at Boston University.

So, it turns out our history, piano and tennis teachers had it right all along, practice does indeed makes perfect. If you can get something right repeatedly, you're likely to keep getting it more right. In other words, “perfect practice makes perfect,” says Mark Histed, one of the co-authors on the paper published in Neuron.

Why we hate being wrong

For most of human history, tribal members survived because they banded into groups. Remaining in the good graces of the tribe was essential to benefitting from its safety and resources. As a result, our subconscious reflexively works to protect our reputation. Being wrong, historically, correlates with being perceived as lower in the tribal hierarchy and therefore less important to the tribe.

Aside from group status, in primitive times being wrong could be fatal. Without the benefits of modern medicine, a hunting injury could lead to a painful death. Foraging the wrong mushrooms could kill the family. The drive to not be wrong, had survival benefits.

Our ego, or sense of self, finds comfort in our various identities. Just as we have fight, flight, or freeze instincts to protect our physical well-being, we defend our psychological sense of self when our various identities are threatened. This is why if someone makes fun of our favorite football team, city, state, country, music artist, political party, hero, religion, ideas, and so on, we feel a surge of emotion to defend them. In a way, this is quite curious. Why does our favorite football team or music group need defending? They aren't actually under any attack. They don't need our protection, yet we experience this almost irresistible urge to defend them. …

The greater level of psychological investment we have in an idea, a view, political party, cause, etc., the more inclined we will be to defend them when they are threatened. …

Thus, if we've championed a movement, cause, group, or belief, it is extremely difficult to back out and say, "Um, yeah, I was wrong for spending all that time, money, and energy promoting that cause for the past 10 years. I'm terribly sorry that I wasted part of my life, and yours, doing that!"

On top of that, if we have others within our social group with whom we are well-connected, there is a very painful social cost to admitting we are wrong. When we don't conform to our group's ideals and identity, we will be cast out. From an evolutionary standpoint, the loss of our group, our tribe, frequently meant death.

Embracing the mistakes

While we are wired against mistakes for self preservation, in the safer confines of modern society the urge to not make or admit to mistakes hinders individual growth. In our modern tribes admitting to a mistake is, counterintuitively, viewed positively as a sign of strength and self confidence. Those who are less afraid to acknowledge their errors are quicker to repair those errors and less likely to repeat them.

For too many, fear of failure prevents them from taking risks to advance in relationships, their occupation, and their personal growth.

“We want to live in the space where we embrace challenges where we don’t know if things will work. You get a whole lot of creativity when you stay in that stance; it’s the growth edge of approach motivation,” says Anne Browning, associate dean for well-being at UW Medicine.

Putting this all together

In previous Foundation articles we discussed how little we see, how little we know, how little we remember, and we discussed the imperfect tools we use to adapt to our limited knowledge and experiences. Here we covered processing errors our brains make and a some research on how our brains identify and adjust for these errors.

Neuroscience is a field that is still quite young. While the structures of the brain have been studied under the microscope for some time, it’s only been in recent years that technology developments have allowed scientists to ‘see’ how the brain processes information. We still know very little about processing errors in the brain and related adaptations.

We have clues from research performed in psychology and sociology. The philosophers have wrestled with topics since the ancient Greeks. Even in fields outside of neurobiology, there is little research on how error and error adaptations have shaped human behavior over time.

While there is so much more to be learned, recognizing that our brains make processing mistakes and send signals when error states are recognized can help us correct our resulting mistakes.

Exercises

• Think of a time when you recognized your own cognitive dissonance. How did you react?

• Think of a time when you induced cognitive dissonance in someone you had a disagreement with. How did they react?

• Think of a time when you made an error and your brain had a hard time making sense of the error and working around it. What feelings did you experience during this event?

Finale

This is the sixth foundational essay. Last week we covered conscious and subconscious strategies humans use to fill their gaps in knowledge. Next week, we’ll discuss how missing knowledge and error affects what you read in this newsletter (and, by extension, elsewhere).

Thank you for taking time out of your day to participate in this newsletter. Your readership is valued.

To support this newsletter please like and comment below. Don’t forget to recommend us to your inquisitive friends and family. Have a great week!

Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

In You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know we covered how little we perceive, how little we know, and how poorly we remember. In Our Tribes and How They Shape Us we covered how we use our tribes to help fill in what we don’t know. The last essay, Wisdom of the Crowd, Madness of the Mob, we went over how we take cues from those around us to fill in our knowledge gaps. Today, we discuss how our brains fill in perception and knowledge gaps to ease decision making.

Information overload

The brain is constantly taking in information and attempting to process it. When the brain trips over a piece of information it can’t quickly process, or deems important, it reduces information processing in other parts of the brain and narrows its focus on the problem at hand. Along with this, anxiety increases and the individual becomes less comfortable. With the brain making 35,000 decisions a day, we wouldn’t be able to function if decisions weren’t made quickly. To do this, the brain develops ‘shortcuts’ to fill in missing information. This allows us to make quick decisions but if we fail to understand the processes involved, our quick decisions can become quick and enduring mistakes.

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Olive, the other reindeer

Hearing is a very imperfect process. Sound waves interfere with each other as multiple sources of sound compete for our ear’s attention. The brain must then process that information in a useful manner. In our modern world we encounter increasingly noisy environments, which the brain has to process in a useful manner.

Netflix reports that now 40% of viewers have the subtitles turned on. One reason that subtitle use is so high is that movie dialog competes with an increasing amount of simultaneous music and sound effects. This sounds great in a movie theater, but it quickly becomes a sonic soup over small, inexpensive TV speakers.

When someone is talking, especially in a noisy environment, our brain has to process the sound into meaningful words. It does this remarkably well by filling in missing sounds and interpreting missed sounds and words to guess what was said. Most of the time we don’t even realize we are missing consonants and vowels.

We sift through sounds, activate and reject countless alternatives, and select one single meaning out of myriad homonyms, near-matches, and possible parsings—even though speakers may have different accents, pronunciations, intonations, or inflections. And, in the overwhelming majority of instances, we get it right.

Our brains must not only interpret words out of sounds, they must also interpret meaning to those words. To do this, the brain uses cues and context to determine what was meant.

Some examples of how our brain’s adaptations can go wrong:

Mondegreens

Mondegreens are misheard versions of phrases, sayings, lyrics, poetic phrases or slogans. The mishearing of these leads to misinterpretations and gives rise to new, similar-sounding sayings that offer new and often unique meanings.

“Olive, the other reindeer” is one of the most well known mondegreens, eventually taking on a life of its own in literature and the movies. The original phrase is “all of the other reindeer”, but because ‘all of’ and ‘olive’ are nearly indistinguishable to the human ear the brain guesses wrong, creating a mondegreen.

Eggcorns

An eggcorn, as we reported and as Merriam-Webster puts it, is "a word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase.

An eggcorn is similar to a mondegreen in that the brain fills in the wrong term, but logistically accurate, for what was said.

Here are [two] examples of common eggcorns:

1. Alzheimer’s disease/old-timer’s disease: Since this neurological condition mainly affects older individuals, some mistakenly believe it’s pronounced “old-timer’s disease.” Despite the similar pronunciation, it’s important to get this one right for reasons of both linguistic correctness and sensitivity.

2. Coleslaw/cold slaw: This side dish comes to your table “cold,” so you might think that’s the first syllable you’re hearing in its name. “Coleslaw” is a cold dish, but that’s incidental to its actual name. …

Oronyms

The English language is a language of many words with similar or identical spellings and pronunciations but different meanings. Oronyms are paronymic words or phrases with similar pronunciations but different spellings and meanings.

An oronym became the basis for a lawsuit in 2001. A waitress won a monthlong contest to see who would sell the most beer. When she was led out to the parking lot to receive her prize, instead of seeing a new “Toyota”, she was given a “toy Yoda”. The case was settled and her lawyer said she would be able to pick up a new car at a Toyota dealership.

Her brain perceived the sounds correctly, but her unscrupulous manager knew she’d interpret the phrase to mean a new car, not a new toy — as did the rest of the staff.

McGurk effect

In real life, too, we do not have direct acquaintance with the world, but rather we depend on our senses to paint an accurate picture of the world. And how well do they do? Not very well. Our traitorous senses will lie to us on a near-daily basis. …

The McGurk effect is produced when you have a video of a speaker mouthing one phoneme and then you dub over a different phoneme altogether. In this case, the speaker makes the lip movements of “gah, gah, gah,” but the sound “bah, bah, bah” is the substituted in. Oddly, what happens is that you will hear the phoneme “dah, dah, dah.” This is the peculiar result of a dissonance in your perceptions. Your eyes are expecting a certain noise, but your ears provide another. So, with a cartoonish whirring of gears, the brain implodes and produces a third sound — even though it was never actually included in the audio track.

In the last example, the staff of the Hooters restaurant used the context of the contest and (reasonably) assumed that the manager’s vocalization meant “Toyota”. Our brains also use visual information to determine the context of a phrase. Here, the brain perceived a mismatch between what was heard and what it saw, so it created a new auditory perception to “fix” the perceived error. It filled in the blank incorrectly.

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

In the picture above, do you see the rays of light emanating from the center? Those aren’t there. Your brain processed the image from your eyes by adding the rays coming out from the center. It’s an illusion and another example of how our brain fills in data in addition to what our senses detect.

This is an example of several visual illusions you can find online. There are approximately 30 different areas of the brain that process visual information. The resulting collaboration can result in visual perceptions, such as these beams of light, that don’t exist (zoom into the image to verify). Most of the time, our visual processing does such a good job that we don’t notice it.

“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.”

Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.

We can see into the future… sort of

When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world. …

Changizi now says it's our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd.

The brain requires a 1/10th delay to process an image, so it fills in this gap with an artificial image. Many illusions, and the livelihood of magicians, depend on this phenomena.

Blind to what we see

As our brain can’t process all the information the eyes take in, the brain ignores information it deems unimportant. If what is being ignored then changes, the brain is unlikely to notice that change. This is called change blindness.

When you’ve failed to see something that is right in front of you (“If it was a snake it would have bit you!”) then you’ve experienced this phenomena. Yep, your visual system is not only creating images that aren’t there, it is also blocking images that are there. It creates a blank that your mind paints in with a previous image.

Take the scene in Ace Ventura. We can take in the scene with the chess board, Jim Carrey, and Vincent Cadby. Several shots include the chess board filled with pieces. …

A lot goes on as the camera cuts back and forth, but we’re in the same room. When we get to the scene without the chess pieces, our minds have already started to “fill in the blanks.” We don’t have to visually process every piece of the set the cameras are showing - that would be exhausting. We expect there to be chess pieces on the board. Why wouldn’t there be?

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Brain Adaptations

The above are some examples how the visual processing and auditory processing functions of the brain adapt to receiving imperfect information by adding information. Here are some other ways the brain copes with missing information:

Pattern matching

1. Our brain craves patterns (Bor, 2012). The talent to recognize patterns is something most people don’t know they need or realize that they already have. If we can turn data into a pattern or rule, then according to Daniel Bor, “near-magical results ensue. We no longer need to remember a mountain of data; we need to only recall one simple law” (Bor, 2012).

A special layer of the brain found only in mammals is responsible. It is called the neocortex, the outermost layer of the brain. Because of its numerous folds, it accounts for 80 percent of the weight of the human brain.

The beauty of patterns for the human brain is that it saves time and energy, allowing the brain to quickly process new information based on how it handled similar patterns in the past.

Humans try to detect patterns in their environment all the time, Konovalov said, because it makes learning easier.

For example, if you are given driving directions in an unfamiliar city, you can try to memorize each turn.

But if you see a pattern -- for example, turn left, then right, then left, then right -- it will be easier to remember.

In fact, what distinguished the human brain most from other animals is its unique ability to recognize patterns and apply those pattens to new information and situations.

This article considers superior pattern processing (SPP) as the fundamental basis of most, if not all, unique features of the human brain including intelligence, language, imagination, invention, and the belief in imaginary entities such as ghosts and gods. SPP involves the electrochemical, neuronal network-based, encoding, integration, and transfer to other individuals of perceived or mentally-fabricated patterns.

Photo by Madison Oren

Heuristics/cognitive shortcuts

A heuristic is a convenient mental shortcut that returns a ‘good enough’ result.

A heuristic, or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation.

Some examples of how we simplify decision making:

Beliefs

A belief is a firmly held opinion. We develop useful-to-us opinions of how the world operates. Beliefs are not facts and, though we believe them to be true, they might not be. We use our beliefs and knowledge to form our values, and to inform our decisions.

Beliefs are our brain’s way of making sense of and navigating our complex world. They are mental representations of the ways our brains expect things in our environment to behave, and how things should be related to each other—the patterns our brain expects the world to conform to. Beliefs are templates for efficient learning and are often essential for survival.

As we covered in You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, we possess very little of the available knowledge in existence. To fill this blank, we have beliefs that we use as guides.

Belief systems

A belief system is a collection of interoperating beliefs. They extend beyond religious belief systems. Most of our important tribes, including families and cultures, have their own belief system. Politics is centered around the clash of political belief systems such as liberalism, conservatism, socialism, capitalism, anarchism, or libertarianism. There are philosophical belief systems such as utilitarianism, stoicism, or existentialism. Even within scientific circles there are belief systems with their own theories, postulates, and frameworks. Each belief system is a tool to help fill in the blanks of our knowledge and understanding.

Belief systems are structures of norms that are interrelated and that vary mainly in the degree in which they are systemic. What is systemic in the Belief system is the interrelation between several beliefs. What features warrant calling this stored body of concepts a belief system? Belief systems are the stories we tell ourselves to define our personal sense of Reality. Every human being has a belief system that they utilize, and it is through this mechanism that we individually, “make sense” of the world around us.

Values

There are two types of values — terminal and instrumental. Terminal values are the desired result such as world peace, happiness, security, and safety. (Or if you’re a comic book arch villain — chaos.) Instrumental values are those values you hold dear in pursuit of your terminal values. Examples include being loving, obedient, independent, logical, or responsible.

Your values are the things that you believe are important in the way you live and work.

They (should) determine your priorities, and, deep down, they're probably the measures you use to tell if your life is turning out the way you want it to.

What we value guides our decisions and actions. Values are distinct to each individual so each person makes different decisions based on their defined values. One person may highly value gathering with family and friends; choosing a home with a large entertaining space. Another person may value simplicity and choose a small, easy to clean home. A third person might value their perceived status and choose an ostentatious home. There is more than one path to the top of the mountain.

Principles

Facts and situations are typically murky. As a result, humans and organizations establish principles as a guide for how to make decisions and act; and they are driven by the values of their creator.

Principles counter the knowledge problem of policymaking. They are short, pithy ground rules for engaging with a wide variety of situations. They do not suggest specific actions, but they do suggest specific kinds of actions.

Examples of principles include “always be kind”, “first, do no harm”, “rigorous honesty”, and “if it feels good, do it”.

Our beliefs/opinions drive our values, from which we set our principles.

Its all imperfect

All of these tools that our brains use to fill in the blanks are imperfect, but useful. Where they fail us most is when we forget that they are guidelines, subject to error and misuse. Some examples:

Overfitting

Overfitting is a term normally associated with machine learning, but it also applies to the errors we make when pattern matching. These can include mistakenly incorporating irrelevant data into a pattern and failing to apply a useful pattern to broader circumstances.

False memories/Memory distortion/Mandala effect

As details fade from our memories, that is if we ever did remember the details, our brain works to fill in these blanks with manufactured memories. They are just as real to us as our actual memories.

But the real surprise for us was the second most common type of error. The average person, under ideal viewing conditions, made one and one-quarter errors of the imagination. In other words, people just made things up. Without knowing they were doing it.

This is more common than we realize. Captain Kirk never said “Beam me up, Scotty”. Ed McMahon was not the spokesperson for Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. Dorothy didn’t say “Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." There is no major peanut butter brand called “Jiffy”. The Monopoly character doesn’t have a monocle. There is no breakfast cereal named “Fruit Loops”. The quote from Field of Dreams isn’t “Build it, and they will come”, nor did Darth Vader ever say “Luke, I am your father”, Forest Gump didn’t say “Life is like a box of chocolates”, and Roy Schneider didn’t say “We’re going to need a bigger boat” in Jaws.

So, yes, it’s always a good idea to double check your facts.

Illusions

I covered this above as an example of the brain manufacturing information, but it’s also an example of the brain filling in false visual information.

"If you didn't have the brain filling in all of this missing information, every time you looked at an object from a slightly different view, it would be a different object and that would be very confusing and difficult to cope with," says Patrick Bennett, associate professor of psychology at U of T and the study's other senior author.

"This filling in gives some consistency and continuity to the world."

While examining illusions can be a fun pastime, illusions have real consequences when we rely on eyewitness testimony. They can cause us to misjudge distances or see an incorrect trajectory.

Visual illusions occur due to properties of the visual areas of the brain as they receive and process information. In other words, your perception of an illusion has more to do with how your brain works -- and less to do with the optics of your eye.

An illusion is "a mismatch between the immediate visual impression and the actual properties of the object,"

Superstitions

Superstitions, a mistake in a cause and effect that is solidified with confirmation bias, is an error in pattern matching. The person believes that an action or ritual will positively or negatively affect an outcome. While few still throw salt over their shoulder anymore, there are still many who have “lucky shirts” or engage in a ritualistic routine before a big game. Superstitions can be quite debilitating for some, but can also help the individual calm their nerves and focus on a task.

Superstitious people often experience a neurotic paradox, which is when they engage in a certain behavior because they don’t want a certain outcome, and – after doing the behavior – it doesn’t happen. For instance, if a person walks around a ladder instead of underneath it and nothing bad happens to them, they feel as though they avoided “bad luck” or misfortune.

“You think it works, so the behavior persists,” Storch said. “That’s one of the reasons you see these behaviors continue for a lot of people. They see a truth to it because the feared outcomes didn’t take place.”

Stereotyping

As mentioned earlier, humans have evolved to be pattern matching machines. We fill in what we don’t know with templates created from similar experiences. This serves us well, most of the time, as it’s an efficient (if not always accurate) method of working around uncertainties. It’s hard baked into our DNA from thousands of years of avoiding dangerous out-groups and predicting behavior by their tribal membership.

Psychologists once believed that only bigoted people used stereotypes. Now the study of unconscious bias is revealing the unsettling truth: We all use stereotypes, all the time, without knowing it. We have met the enemy of equality, and the enemy is us. …

The cognitive approach refused to let the rest of us off the hook. It made the simple but profound point that we all use categories—of people, places, things—to make sense of the world around us. "Our ability to categorize and evaluate is an important part of human intelligence," says Banaji. "Without it, we couldn't survive."

The problem with stereotypes today is that society is far more complex. Groups are far less homogeneous than in centuries past. Individuals belong to many tribes, often with conflicting value systems. Attempts to define individuals by their group membership, trait, or appearance have high levels of error. This is compounded further by social media where groups form with shared distortions about shared out-groups. The result is stereotyping that undermines knowledge and understanding, instead of assisting it.

Misjudging similarity

This is another pattern matching error. We make decisions based on circumstances being similar to a time before, but we’re wrong. We sometimes believe that someone is a member of a shared tribe, with its shared values, but they aren’t.

Changing times

This is phenomena that all parents will recognize. A parent finds a way to motivate or compel their kids only to find that their ‘trick’ no longer works. Companies find a successful niche only for it to fade away or promote a product that loses its appeal to the masses. Times change and the patterns we detect can change over time. The shortcuts we develop sometimes stop working. It’s a mistake to assume that what once worked will always work and we can be painfully slow to recognize that the times have changed on us.

Putting this all together

As amazing as our 3 pound brains are, they have a limited capability to take in information, retain that information, and still make 35,000 decisions a day. To do so, the brain has numerous strategies to accomplish this, including:

• When needed information is missing, the brain pulls clues from the words and behaviors of those around us, favoring our in-groups and those in authority.

• The brain will search for patterns that can be applied to the current decision.

• The brain will fill in the missing information by creating a memory that fits with the existing knowledge.

• The conscious brain will make decisions based on the beliefs, rules, and values the individual has developed over time.

• Or, the brain may choose the quickest option — to repeat the decision that was used the last time the situation came up.

All of these adaptations are imperfect and can result in bad outcomes. In a healthy system, the brain (hopefully) learns from those mistakes and makes a different decision the next time.

Where these adaptations fail is when the person assumes perfection in their decision making process, whether it be the belief that their memories are perfect or that their conclusions are infallible. This is further complicated by our subconscious drive to preserve our reputation by vigorously defending our decisions and related opinions.

By recognizing how our brain makes decisions, and the weaknesses in that process, we can spot our errors quicker and reduce their quantity.

Exercises

To be done in a non-distracting environment:

• Identify a decision you recently made based on spotting a pattern.

• Identify a decision you’ve recently made despite not having enough information. Which of the above methods did you use to come to that decision?

• Identify a decision you’ve made that was made about an individual that was made without conscious thought.

Finale

This is the fifth foundational essay for this newsletter. Last week we covered how the people around us influence our decisions. The next foundational essay will cover human error and how we adjust to those errors.

Thank you for visiting today. Your readership is greatly appreciated and valued. If you found this newsletter interesting like and comment below. Please recommend this newsletter to friends and family who might find this content interesting. Have a great week!

Your friend,

DJ

Welcome!

We are not only influenced by our tribes, we are influenced other groups around us. We use them to inform us, to encourage us, to entertain us, and (sometimes) to lead us. When a group grows into a crowd it can become an entity of it’s own where its member’s autonomy gives way to the single mindedness of the mob.

Understanding these influences and how they operate allows us to maintain our autonomy and agency in moments of chaos and uncertainty.

Oxytocin

Our desire to join and remain in groups is facilitated by the hormone oxytocin, which assists social bonding. The brain chemical has a role in pair bonding, maternal bonding, in-group/out-group bias, trust, and situational honesty.

Oxytocin is not only correlated with the preferences of individuals to associate with members of their own group, but it is also evident during conflicts between members of different groups. During conflict, individuals receiving nasally administered oxytocin demonstrate more frequent defense-motivated responses toward in-group members than out-group members. Further, oxytocin was correlated with participant desire to protect vulnerable in-group members, despite that individual's attachment to the conflict.^[94] Similarly, it has been demonstrated that when oxytocin is administered, individuals alter their subjective preferences in order to align with in-group ideals over out-group ideals.^[95] These studies demonstrate that oxytocin is associated with intergroup dynamics. Further, oxytocin influences the responses of individuals in a particular group to those of another group. The in-group bias is evident in smaller groups; however, it can also be extended to groups as large as one's entire country leading toward a tendency of strong national zeal. A study done in the Netherlands showed that oxytocin increased the in-group favoritism of their nation while decreasing acceptance of members of other ethnicities and foreigners.^[96] People also show more affection for their country's flag while remaining indifferent to other cultural objects when exposed to oxytocin.^[97] It has thus been hypothesized that this hormone may be a factor in xenophobictendencies secondary to this effect. Thus, oxytocin appears to affect individuals at an international level where the in-group becomes a specific "home" country and the out-group grows to include all other countries.

When we gather in groups our oxytocin levels increase and experience changes from a purely individual experience to a shared group experience. You may have had this experience when attending a concert or a sporting event. It also explains why the emergence of home theaters with their big screens and custom sound systems have not totally replace the movie theater. Research shows that that movie watchers enjoy a movie more when surrounded by others in a theater — the energy of the crowd is contagious.

Groups inform those around them

As we covered in a previous essay, humans have a limited ability to take in and process information. To compensate, the mind subconsciously checks the actions and reactions of those around to determine how it should react in uncertain situations (informational social influence).

The bystander effect

During most of our existence we encounter familiar situations and we respond with a practiced response. These moments require little conscious thought, such as stepping over a curb or opening a door. When we encounter something unexpected and volatile, such as a confrontation on the street, most of us don’t have a preprogrammed response — we freeze and assess. In these moments the subconscious leans on the actions of those around to determine what the next step should be. If everybody is running, then run. If everybody is frozen, then freeze. And if somebody is stepping in to help, then several people will step in to help.

This is called the bystander effect and examples periodically show up in the press where it’s reported that a crowd failed to step in and help someone in distress. (After an investigation, its often found that many of the most shocking stories were exaggerations by alarmed eye witnesses).

Knowing this phenomena exists can help you should you ever be a victim and witnesses aren’t seeming to step in. Should this happen, look at an individual and ask that individual for help. This breaks the subconscious response in the witness and forces a conscious response. Others watching, will then join in to help. It’s advised that women who are being manhandled by a stranger should shout out that they don’t know this person and yell that they are being attacked. Again, that breaks the subconscious processing and engages conscious processing of the event by witnesses.

Social Proof

This is conscious decision to look to those around you to determine if your behavior is socially acceptable. It might be in regards to your choice of clothing for an event or whether your dog is allowed in a place you want to go.

When a person is in a situation where they are unsure of the correct way to behave, they will often look to others for clues concerning the correct behavior. When "we conform because we believe that others' interpretation of an ambiguous situation is more accurate than ours and will help us choose an appropriate course of action".

** In some definitions, social proof is used interchangeably with informational social influence. Because some sources don’t use the terms synonymously, I’ve chosen to follow suit. Many of the terms used in this article have overlapping uses, especially with non-academic sources. This is a function of our sloppy language, what matters is understanding the behavior, not the terminology.

Conformity

There is a natural predisposition to conforming to the actions and beliefs of those around you. This is an evolutionary trait which evolved from the need to stay in the good graces of your tribe in order to be seen as a reliable ally. This is natural behavior within a tribe, but even around strangers there is a tendency to try to fit in, even if it means disguising part of who you are. This is why rallies, campaign events, and company events are created — to generate a common purpose.

Peer influence (Normative Social Influence)

To maintain group cohesion, our peer groups will encourage, if not enforce, conformity. We are also wired to outcompete our peers…

The researchers found that the striatum, a part of the brain associated with rewards, showed higher activity when a participant beat a peer in the lottery, as opposed to when the participant won while alone.

The medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with social reasoning, was more activated as well. …

"These findings suggest that the brain is equipped with the ability to detect and encode social signals, make social signals salient, and then, use these signals to optimize future behavior," Coricelli said. …

In group environments, on the other hand, rewards tend to be winner-takes-all.

Nowhere is this more clear than in sexual competition, where -- to borrow a phrase from racing legend Dale Earnhardt, Sr. -- second place is just first loser.

We are most familiar with the influence of peer pressure on teenagers. The research indicates that we are all encounter peer pressure but teenagers, who are undergoing significant changes in the brain, are more susceptible to giving in to that pressure. As adults, we hear it as “stay for one more drink” and “lets have dessert”, but peer influence also encourages us to get out of bad relationships, to exercise together, and to participate in positive social activities. Peer pressure can come from friends and family that want the best for you and from those who want company for something they shouldn’t be doing.

Collective identity

When a group gathers together for a common purpose, they create a collective identity. This term can be used very broadly, but a specific example is when a group gathers to respond to a disaster. Without government instruction, groups of citizens band together to provide relief and save those at risk. These bottom up citizen initiatives (BUIs) flow to where the need is and interoperate surprisingly well without formal supervision. They use the collective knowledge to acquire needed resources and use the collective actions to guide what needs to be done next. We’ve seen this with people being removed from rubble or rescued by boat from a flood. Others will setup kitchens or provide water and shelter. The actions of the group guide the actions of the individuals.

Local people are important actors in urban disaster response. When a disaster strikes, the immediate response – search and rescue; dealing with the injured, the traumatized and the homeless – is carried out mostly by family members, friends and neighbours. It might be many hours or even days before professional emergency teams arrive, depending on the location of the disaster, the extent of physical disruption to transport and communications, and the capacity of official organizations to respond. …

The diversity of activities and constellations observed in our screening speaks to the flexibility of BUIs as an additional instrument of flood risk governance. BUIs seem remarkably agile in terms of their duration and scope, particularly if they are self‐organised groups active in the preparedness, response and recovery stages: they can be established quickly, maintained for a limited period, and disbanded as soon as their mission is accomplished. They can easily reorient their agenda if local needs shift or previously silent population segments raise their voices. They are unconstrained by the legal and administrative rulesets with which governmental authorities have to comply.

The broader, and more common, use of collective identity, refers to social movements and also center around a central purpose. They are often planned or created over time, and they tend to operate more like tribes, which you can read more about here.

Groupthink

The bane of organizations is groupthink — where individuals suppress their opinions and join what they believe to be the group’s opinion. This leads to bad decision making as fewer alternatives are considered and potential problems can go undiscussed.

Groupthink describes a particular group dynamics leading to a decision-making pathology. Occurring under widely observed conditions, groupthink can lead to a degradation of decision making whereby group members sacrifice their independence in favor of herding behavior. A minority, often of one, becomes the decision maker often with impetuosity and unwarranted rectitude. A variety of groupthink symptoms could lead to overestimation of the group’s power and morality, pressures toward uniformity of viewpoint and closed-mindedness.

The antidote to groupthink is to foster an environment where polite disagreement is encouraged, even rewarded, and where an authority figure does not dominate the conversation.

FOMO, the fear of missing out

You’ve experienced this if you’ve ever seen a line, joined it, and then asked others in the line what they were queueing for. The subconscious brain triggers a desire to enter the line because it assumes there is a rare and valuable resource to be had; an artifact of millennia where scavenging for resources was necessary for survival. You may have also noticed that during an extreme weather event or pandemic that the sight of someone carrying an unnecessarily large amount of an item out of a store triggers others to do the same, regardless of need.

Red sneakers effect

In many ways we are wired to fit in with those around us. So when someone purposefully stands out due to dress or manner, we assume that person has a higher status or higher competence. The term red sneakers effect refers to someone who wears red sneakers in a room full of professionally dressed individuals. The individuals in that room will give more weight to what that person has to say.

In the present research, we propose that under certain conditions, nonconforming behaviors can be more beneficial than efforts to conform and can signal higher status and competence to others. We argue that while unintentional violations of normative codes and etiquette can indeed result in negative inferences and attributions, when the deviant behavior appears to be deliberate, it can lead to higher rather than lower status and competence inferences.

Social loafing

This may not seem obvious at first, but you’ve likely experienced this with work crews and in large organizations. As a work group expands, the individual’s effort becomes less impactful, so there is a tendency to not work as hard when there are many people working toward the same task. This is one reason why larger organizations tend to be less efficient. This effect also helps explain why recognizing individual effort can increase productivity.

Social loafing describes the tendency of individuals to put forth less effort when they are part of a group. Because all group members are pooling their efforts to achieve a common goal, each member contributes less than they would if they were individually responsible.

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The Madness of the crowds

This pattern of being affected by those around us gets amplified when the crowd gets bigger and powerful emotions, such as anger, take hold. The crowd becomes a mob and the mob can start becoming destructive. When this happens, individuals in the crowd get swept up in behaviors they normally wouldn’t condone. It’s a powerful experience which some seek out; visiting protests with weapons and tools of destruction. These individuals will seek out other like-minded individuals and try to stir up similar behavior from those around them.

It was this crowd psychology that drove the “lynching parties” in America’s past. It’s what drives the scrums over store sales on Black Friday. It’s what drove the mass killings between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rawanda. And it’s what drove much of the killing in China’s cultural revolution.

Here are a few reasons why this phenomena occurs:

Deindividuation

Individuals can lose a sense of themselves when in a crowd and the crowd’s emotions escalate. The prefrontal cortex of the brain, which handles decision making, impulse control, empathy, and emotional regulation, becomes less active. This loosened conscious control over the limbic system creates an environment where actions are detached from perceived consequences.

Deindividuation is a state in which you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility. An individual relinquishes individual responsibility for actions and sees behavior as a consequence of group norms and expectations.

Dehumanization

With the prefrontal cortex not in control, most empathy is gone and the humanity of others gets lost. People are no longer perceived as human but as objects. Extreme physical actions such as trampling, shooting, stabbing, clubbing, or torching them have the same empathetic impact as doing the same to a cardboard box.

Dehumanization is intimately bound up with the worst atrocities that human beings have perpetrated against one another. It haunts the episodes of genocide, war, and racial oppression that deface our history. …

[D]ehumanization has the function of disabling inhibitions against violence. There’s an important reason why we need dehumanization (and also other methods) to help us do terrible things to one another.

Emotional contagion

Crowds have a shared emotional response. We enjoy this experience when attending movies, concerts, and comedy shows. This shared response turns dark when the crowd’s emotions turn to anger and vengeance. These are our most powerful emotions and when the prefrontal cortex isn’t in control, violence becomes possible.

Emotional contagion occurs when one person responds to the stimuli they feel when seeing another person’s emotions. Early studies found that emotional contagion occurred unconsciously, as a copied behavior based on what someone was observing.

Diffusion of responsibility

If you were to break a window, then you would bear the full emotional responsibility for the action. If you’re one of a thousand people breaking windows then your brain calculates your responsibility as 1/1000th of the total. This reduces your perceived consequences and is one of the reasons why larger mobs become more dangerous.

[B]eing part of a group creates the perception that violent or unacceptable behavior is not a personal responsibility but a group one.

Anonymity

A person who would never think of throwing a bottle at another, might do so while hidden in a crowd of thousands. When we are perceived as being anonymous, we feel freer to breaking social conventions. This gets played out on the internet all the time. In times of social upheaval, we’ll see those in both sides of a conflict wearing masks (whether for concealment or protection). This gives the mask wearing psychological permission to be violent. The wearing of the mask also makes the wearer seem less human to others, increasing the chance of being attacked.

Some of the apparent causes of mob mentality are well understood. Anonymity is one: Yankee fans can disappear into a blur of blue pinstripes. "I have never been called names like that in my entire life," says Cikara of her New York visit. (She has completed post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge.) When people feel they will not be recognized or called to answer for their actions, they are more likely to behave wantonly.

Conformity

As mentioned earlier, we tend to conform to the behaviors and actions of those around us. Just as we are more likely to stand peacefully in line if all those around us are, we are also more likely to mimic the actions of those around us when in a mob.

Participants’ attitude became more prosocial or antisocial when they learned about the choices of an extremely prosocial or antisocial agent, regardless of whether the agent was a group of people, one person, or a computer. …

By learning to predict the agent’s behaviour, participants deduce how salient following the norm is for others, and change their behaviour to be more consistent with them.

Informational influence

When a mob starts rushing for the door, rushing into a building, or fleeing down a street, most of the crowd often doesn’t know what caused the movement; but each member decides that the others must know why and they join in the action. This herding instinct is not much different to what happens with herds of animals on the Serengeti. It’s an instinctual behavior.

“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.”
― C.G. Jung

Putting this all together

Our instincts cause us to be influenced by those around us. This has been a distinct evolutionary advantage as it facilitated our ancestors working together as a cohesive unit when under threat or when the circumstances were uncertain. In calm circumstances these oxytocin-driven experiences can bring great enjoyment and help bond together a group of people in a crisis. But in moments when the crowds are large and powerful negative emotions dominate, the single-mindedness of a mob can override the brain’s ability to control impulses, control emotions, and to weigh the risks of a given action. By recognizing the forces at play in these moments, we can take steps to maintain our safety and minimize future risks.

Exercises

To be done in a non-distracting environment.

• Think of a time when you went along with the group despite having a different opinion. Identify the factors that influenced you.

• Think of a social event where the mood of those around you influenced your enjoyment of the evening.

Finale

This is the fourth foundational essay for this newsletter. Last week we covered the importance of tribes in our lives and how they influence us. The next foundational essay will discuss how our brains adapt to decision making in uncertainty. There is remarkably little research on this, despite its enormous impact on society and on us as individuals.

Thank you for visiting today. Your readership is greatly appreciated and valued. If you found this newsletter interesting please recommend this newsletter to your friends and family. Have a great week!

Your friend,

DJ

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Welcome!

What is tribalism?

This definition explains it well:

Tribalism refers to customs and beliefs transmitted and enacted in groups (tribes) sharing a common identity and in which centralized political organization and authority are absent. Academic and public references to tribalism have been expanded to refer to behaviors and beliefs associated with diverse populations, including those that share any one, or all, of the following: race, ethnicity, language, religion, ways of life, kinship, attitudes, worldview, and generation.

Why we are tribal

From our modern viewpoint it is hard to imagine what life was like in our earliest ancestors societies. Existence was a constant battle of trying to acquire more calories than were expended. The earliest civilizations used rudimentary tools, created from wood, stone, bone, and antlers, to hunt animals and forage for food. The tribes were small and closely related. The duties needed for the tribe to survive were distributed based on skill and proficiency. Young, healthy males would travel the area in search for game to meet the tribe’s need for protein. The women would forage for plant-based foods. Many of those who were older or physically limited often took on the roles of task specialists such as craftsman, spiritual leaders, and community leaders. Children took on duties as they became capable.

To survive, these small communities had to cooperate and watch out for each other. Those who didn’t adequately contribute or harmed the group dynamic would be pushed out of the group to survive on their own, which greatly shortened their lifespan. Survival meant staying in the good graces of your tribe.

The Hadza are a population of hunter-gatherers living in a savannah-woodland environment in Northern Tanzania; their traditional foraging lifestyle has been documented extensively in previous work [17]. While no living population is a perfect model of our species’ past, the Hadza lifestyle is similar in critical ways to those of our Pleistocene ancestors. The Hadza hunt and gather on foot with bows, small axes, and digging sticks, without the aid of modern tools or equipment (e.g., no vehicles or guns). As in many other forager societies [10], there is a sexual division of foraging effort; Hadza men hunt game and gather honey, while Hadza women gather plant foods. Men’s forays are typically longer than women’s, as reflected in their mean daily travel distances (see below). Women typically forage in groups, while men tend to hunt alone [17]. As is typical among traditional-living Hadza, over 95% of their calories during this study came from wild foods, including tubers, berries, small- and large-game, baobab fruit, and honey [17] (Fig. S2).

Early groups of humans were closely related, so they looked alike. Their clothing and adornments were made by the same small group of people. They were nomadic, moving to new areas when local food resources became strained or when the weather dictated a move. Occasionally, they would encounter other tribes who would look different; wearing different clothing and adornments. These chance meetings could turn violent as one tribe would try to take the resources of the other. The tribes that were warier of other tribes were the ones that survived.

Tribalism today

Humans today are descended from hundreds of generations of ancestors who were the best at protecting their own and guarding against threats, human or otherwise. Even as resources have become more plentiful and today’s tribes rarely attack for resources, our below conscious mental processing still favors our own tribe(s)/in-groups and is more skeptical of opposing tribes/out-groups.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies reveal that symbols associated with our groups, like team logos or political emblems, activate reward centers in the brain. A study conducted at UCLA observed increased activity in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, regions associated with reward and value processing. These findings suggest that the brain perceives group identity as rewarding and valuable, shedding light on the neural mechanisms of tribalism. Additionally, the release of oxytocin and vasopressin affects sensory information processing, enhancing social recognition memoryand further linking group identity to pleasurable and rewarding experiences (Dluzen et al., 1998a). …

Mirror neurons in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal lobule facilitate understanding others' intentions and emotions, promoting empathy. They are vital for social cognition, including imitation, social learning, and predicting behavior. Mirror neurons also foster social bonds, synchronizing our actions and generating shared emotions, enhancing social interaction. …

In their study, Lacoboni's team found that when participants watched a video of someone they perceived as part of their group, there was increased activity in brain regions associated with reward and social cognition, such as the ventral striatum and the right inferior frontal gyrus. This suggests that our brains are wired to reward us for social behavior reinforcing our tribal identity. …

However, Baumgartner, T. et al (2008). have also shown that oxytocin can contribute to bias, leading to favoritism toward one's own group.

What binds us together

There are many benefits to belonging to a tribe. They can provide structure, safety, support, education, guidance, and mental health benefits. A group, with its members’ diverse knowledge and skills, is more likely to thrive in a hostile environment.

This is clearly evident in family structures, where the tribe (family) is responsible for the development of children.

In providing a supportive and nurturing relationship, parents play a critical role in promoting their children’s healthy development. They also protect their children from the psychological consequences of significant stress by buffering them from the effects of traumas and helping them to regulate their emotions.

Obviously, separation from parents is traumatic; it both removes children’s most important protection and generates a new trauma. Indeed, in studies of institutionalized children, such separation has been found to disrupt normal child development and to have long-term negative consequences for their psychological and physical health. …

We and others have demonstrated that in response to traumas and adverse experiences similar to separation from parents, children secrete high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This elevated cortisol has negative effects on brain structure and connectivity, slowing neuronal growth and reducing volumes of critical brain structures like the hippocampus and affecting brain regions involved in effective emotion regulation. Not surprisingly, research has also demonstrated adverse effects of early trauma on children’s psychological functioning, including higher rates of depression, anxiety and “externalizing,” or acting-out, behaviors.

What blinds us

While tribes bind groups together around commonalities, those who differ from the group are often seen as inferior. While members of the same tribe see each other in their best light, members of different tribes are seen in a darker light with unknown information filled in with negative assumptions. When multiple members of a tribe share a negative assumption it becomes believed as fact (also known as the illusory truth bias). From there, the tribe becomes blinded to information about the other tribe that doesn’t conform with their assumptions (confirmation bias). Of course, each tribe bristles at the false accusations aimed at their group and becomes hostile toward the other. That hostility then provides seeming evidence of the other group’s unsavoriness and bad intentions. In extreme cases, the results are violent.

Bad tribalism is a group identity that fosters the bullying and scapegoating of others not like you. Bad tribalism joins people out of anger, jealousy, and spite, not for collective well-being. The unfortunate irony is that bad tribalism is easy to provoke, but not healthy to maintain. Staying angry is stressful, and large doses of stress are bad for our health. At the same time, good tribalism is difficult to build, but healthy to maintain. When we connect with others to ensure safety and good health, we lower our own stress.

The land of many tribes

We all belong to many tribes, some more tightly and more seriously than others. They are so commonplace that they are often not recognized as tribes and the associated tribal behavior that affects individual behavior is missed.

Family

For most people, their family is their strongest tribe. When it’s at its best, it’s a safe place where you can find support and acceptance. When it’s at its worst, children raised in that environment have skyrocketing risks of dropping out of school, teen pregnancy, mental illness, incarceration, violence, and addiction.

Kinship is one of the most important organizing components of society. From east to west or north to south, you will find this everywhere in society. This social institution ties individuals and groups together and establishes a relationship between them.

Gender/Sex

Boys and girls differ not only in their plumbing but in how their brains develop. They play differently, have different developmental timelines, have differing communication styles, and have differing levels of aggression and impulsivity. As they develop, children choose to play with those that share the same play and communication styles; which is typically those of the same sex. They also have different experiences growing, especially once puberty hits.

It shouldn’t shock you to hear that even as adults men and women have their own tribal affiliation. And they sometimes clash. You’ve heard phrases such as “the war of the sexes”, “battle of the sexes”, “girls club”, “boys club”, “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”, etc..

You’ve also seen healthy and toxic versions of these same-sex friendship groups. Gender groups have strong influence on their members; establishing their own norms and customs.

Girls and boys not only play differently, they use different social strategies to get what they want (e.g., toys) and to influence other children. More often than not, boys gain access to a desired toy by playfully shoving and pushing other boys out of the way, whereas girls gain access by means of verbal persuasion (e.g., polite suggestions to share) and sometimes verbal commands (e.g., “It’s my turn now!”). Maccoby (1998) concluded that the sex differences in play and social styles contribute to segregated social groups because children are unresponsive to the styles of the opposite sex. Boys sometimes try to initiate rough-and-tumble play or play fighting with girls but most girls withdraw from these initiations, whereas most other boys readily join the fray. Girls often attempt to influence the behavior of boys through verbal requests and suggestions but boys, unlike most other girls, are generally unresponsive; many readers are probably wondering whether boys ever become responsive–they do by adulthood, somewhat. …

The net result of sex segregation is that boys and girls spend much of their childhood in distinct peer cultures. It is in the context of these cultures that differences in the social styles and preferences of girls and boys become larger and congeal into patterns that they will take into adolescence and adulthood.

An example on how gender differences vary in adulthood:

In Experiment 1, only women (not men) showed cognitive balance among in-group bias, identity, and self-esteem (A. G. Greenwald et al., 2002), revealing that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own group preference. Experiments 2 and 3 found pro-female bias to the extent that participants automatically favored their mothers over their fathers or associated male gender with violence, suggesting that maternal bonding and male intimidation influence gender attitudes. Experiment 4 showed that for sexually experienced men, the more positive their attitude was toward sex, the more they implicitly favored women. In concert, the findings help to explain sex differences in automatic in-group bias and underscore the uniqueness of gender for intergroup relations theorists.

Religion

Throughout history, each culture emerged with a religious component. Early on, religion was the societal foundation for law, medicine, political leadership, philosophy, history, and interpersonal dynamics.

As societies grew, and religions passed through their reformation stages, many of these functions were passed on to secular government, educational, and medical institutions. Even so, tribal dynamics within religious groups continue due to shared values and interpersonal relationships. For individuals who reject formal religion, many still create their own spiritual tribes which share values.

In three studies, concepts of religion or God activated different prosociality concerns for the ingroup versus outgroup. Whereas religion primes enhanced prosocial behavior toward the religious ingroup, God primes recast prosocial impulses toward religious outsiders. These results integrate two mechanisms for religious prosociality that have been proposed by other scholars, but also, demonstrate that these are distinct aspects of religious cognition. Discussions of religious cognition sometimes conflate religion and belief in God, and these findings remind us of key differences in their meaning and their behavioral associations.

And

Individuals subliminally primed with religious words showed significantly larger increases in negative attitudes toward value-violating out-groups relative to attitudes toward in-groups than those primed with neutral words. This change in relative attitudes was due to simultaneous increases in in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. These effects remained when statistically controlling for self-reported religiosity and spirituality and preexisting attitudes toward these groups.

Tribes also develop for those who oppose specific religions or all religions. These tribes can exhibit the same positive and negative tribal traits as tribes based around a religious belief system.

Location

Our environment binds us together through shared experience, weather, industry, political structure, and shared activities. These areas can be as small as a neighborhood. In Boston you have Southie’s, a once heavily Irish immigrant community that’s since given way to wealthier “townies”. Each of the New York City boroughs have their own identities. And even smaller towns have had their “wrong side the tracks”.

Though it is not to the same extent today as in the past, we still see state and national tribalism that ranges from friendly banter between states to violent conflict between nations.

In a healthy society, a common belief in the nation’s system can soften the edges between the smaller tribes in the country. In their best iteration, they bring together people from all walks of life in response to a natural disaster or national crisis. We saw this effect after 9/11 in America. We also saw this during the Great Depression and World War II when president Franklin Roosevelt used his fireside chats to bring the country together.

In conclusion, we report an experiment testing hypotheses on the prevalence and variation of national parochialism that includes a total of 42 nations. We found national parochialism is a pervasive phenomenon and it occurs around the world with very little variation across nations and cultures. Our findings failed to support prominent hypotheses predicting substantial variation in national parochialism around the world^4,13,14. Rather, national parochialism seems to be a ubiquitous behavior across modern nations, a finding that is in line with an indirect reciprocity perspective, and in general with theories which hypothesize the pervasiveness of ingroup favoritism in humans^4,15,37,38. However, contrary to what was predicted by an indirect reciprocity perspective, we failed to observe that national parochialism only occurred in public (vs. private) situations.

At its best, regional tribalism can bring together differing tribes under a commonality. At its worst, it can override and smother smaller tribes (location based or otherwise).

There are also many unhealthy examples of national tribalism. Throughout history, political leaders have used the shared national experience to overcome resistance to unpopular initiatives, to override the rights of smaller groups, to retain their leadership, and to conquer other nations.

Education

Schools have their own shared experiences along with extra-curricular competitions against other schools. In high schools we see this with ‘cross town rivals’. In colleges we see tribalism between Ivy League schools and between those schools and non-ivy league schools. We also see it between state schools, private schools, and religious schools.

Differences were found regarding student perceptions among competition divisions. Specifically, attendance at a Power Five School influenced student's willingness to support rival teams against other teams, the enjoyment from defeating the rival team, perceptions of rival academic prestige and fan behavior, and likelihood of experiencing Glory Out of Reflected Failure (GORFing), or celebrating when the rival experiences indirect failure. Further, students attending DI No Football Schools and DIII Schools chose academic prestige as a way to derogate their rival schools.

Ethnic/Cultural/Race

I’ve lumped ethnicity, race, and culture together here as they heavily overlap and get mixed together in colloquial conversation despite being unique concepts.

Each group often shares similar foods, music, clothing, dialects, and experiences. This binds them as a tribe/in-group, even more so if there is significant conflict with other tribes/out-groups due to a clash in cultures, a fight for limited resources, or beliefs.

In general, a wide body of social cognitive research has demonstrated that perceivers are better at extracting information from their own-race compared to other-race faces and that these differences can be a barrier to positive cross-race relationships.

Professional/Industry

Tribes develop in professions and industries with unique experiences. Farmers and ranchers gravitate toward each other in social situations. Those in the trades have their own schools and apprenticeship programs. On a job site, there can be rivalries and conflicts between the different trades as their work demands sometimes clash.

Within a company, there can be competing tribes as the shop floor clashes with management or the sales department clashes with… everybody.

The above results indicate that both Pilots and Dispatchers may have ingroup-outgroup bias towards other aerospace specializations, but this effect is manifested toward different groups. Pilots exhibit ingroup-outgroup bias towards Maintenance personnel but not Dispatchers who they view very similarly to themselves. On the other hand, Dispatchers exhibit ingroup-outgroup bias towards Pilots but not Maintenance personnel.

Gangs

Gangs are criminal tribes. They typically share similar clothing, music, drug tastes, slang, tattoos, signs, and criminal activities. Examples include La Cosa Nostra, MS13, Yakuza, Aryan Brotherhood, Gangster Disciples, Hells Angels, and the Russian Mafia.

Killian spoke with 40 gang members from Greensboro, North Carolina. The men he interviewed reported that they considered fellow gang members to be family and that they took care of each other. Killian found that most of the gang members he interviewed had tattoos to publicly show their allegiance to their particular gang, and to show pride in belonging to the group. Several gang members said that being part of a gang meant you were never alone in the world, which is similar to how many people describe being part of a close-knit family or group of friends. Gangs provide members a sense of belonging and protection they do not receive from other relationships or experiences in life.

Political

We are currently in a period of toxic political tribalism. Politics is prone to intense fighting between groups and the current era isn’t as extreme as some times in the past.

When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. When groups feel mistreated and disrespected, they close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.

In America today, every group feels this way to some extent. Whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, straight people and gay people, liberals and conservatives – all feel their groups are being attacked, bullied, persecuted, discriminated against.

Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution – but such is political tribalism.

Compared to other examples of tribalism, political tribalism has some of the strongest bonds.

“Our experiment shows that shared partisanship does indeed have a large impact on social tie formation. People on both sides of the political divide were roughly three times more likely to form social ties with strangers who identify with the same party, compared to counter-partisans,” says Rand.

Their study also found that these new social ties were not just based on pre-existing social circles or algorithm-suggested connections. Rather, people in the study were much more likely to connect with total strangers simply because of shared political views.

Economic Level

If there is research on economic status from the viewpoint of tribalism, it’s buried under a landfill of studies advocating for differing social policies, political paths, and economic palliatives.

Income/wealth based tribalism exists and there is ample evidence for its existence. The poor, middle income, and wealthy each live a different experience. They live in different neighborhoods, have different recreational activities, eat differently, dress differently, socialize differently, attend different schools, and have unique challenges. Politicians base their campaign strategies on economic class resentments and controversies. Each economic class has members that feel they are unfairly affected by members of the other class — that’s tribal behavior.

Sports

Sports has long been associated with tribalism. It’s been said that sports is what humans do when they can’t war with each other. Fans wear the same clothes, bathe in the same sports culture, share the activities of watching the same games, and celebrating the same victories. Sports provides a (usually) safe outlet for some of our basest instincts. There are enemies and alliances; victory and defeat. At its best, sports brings together a community of splintered tribes under the umbrella of a larger shared tribe that isn’t political. Sports can strengthen bonds within a community. At its worst, sports fanatics can feed hooliganism and violence.

Using survey scales of prejudice and discrimination, we also measure the hostility toward rival fans. Of the five major leagues, the NHL was second to the NFL in the hostility fans exhibited toward rivals.

Managing our tribal instincts

Our tribal behaviors are driven at the subconscious level by the limbic system. They are not initiated by conscious thought. However, we can manage these impulses with conscious thought.

We can choose to engage in behaviors, habits, and rituals associated with healthy tribal behavior. These include social gatherings, sharing of knowledge, being supportive, and being ethical. This strengthens in-group bonds, but these skills should also should be used to strengthen our out-group bonds. When we mingle, talk, support, and treat kindly those outside of our groups we strengthen our relationships and the community as a whole.

We can manage the undesirable features of our innate tribalism by recognizing our automatic patterns with outsiders. We can check inner suspicions by engaging and communicating. We can avoid false assumptions by recognizing that we develop opinions without evidence and we can correct those assumptions by asking questions and listening fully. All individuals should develop a good understanding of cognitive fallacies, which often have a basis in tribal drives.

We have the ability to consciously decide who is part of our in-groups. A fan of a sports team can consider a fan of another team to be an enemy or they can consider that person a fellow fan of the sport. A member of a demographic group can view others outside of that group as competition or they can consider them as a fellow member of humanity. It’s our choice how we frame our battlefields in life.

A tribe does not define the member

As I mentioned in You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, our brains have a limited capability to process complex information. One of the mental shortcuts we use to manage all this information is to distill individuals down to the perceived belief system of their tribe. This is a problem as we generally have a poor understanding of another tribe’s belief systems and customs. We also do not know how much of that tribe’s belief system is accepted by the individual. In life we belong to many tribes and the belief systems have conflicting elements. Before lumping any individual into a category, we should first confirm whether their personal beliefs align with what we perceive their tribe’s beliefs to be.

Real dangers

In modern life almost all of our interactions are with individuals who are not a threat. While most of our perceived threats don’t actually turn out to be significant threats, there are individuals who are a physically or emotionally damaging. These include the psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists that inhabit all corners of society. Though they are small in number, they have an outsized negative impact on ourselves and our society. In addition, there are a few people with distorted perceptions that can do great damage in the belief that they are performing a greater good.

We often overlook these individuals because they belong to our own tribe and we assume they share our same beliefs and values. Psychologists offices are filled with individuals who didn’t recognize the damage a loved one did to them. We should not keep the damaging people in our lives, regardless of their status in one of our tribes.

Putting this all together

To summarize, we are primed from birth to belong to groups/tribes. The first, and most powerful, group being the family. These groups help form our knowledge, beliefs, morality, and customs. These tribal bonds are strengthened through hormonal signals in the brain. When the tribal system is healthy, it benefits the members. When it is unhealthy, it can be destructive to all. Because these behaviors are driven at the subconscious level, it’s important to consciously recognize our tribal influences and to avoid those that are damaging to ourselves and others. We should not assume that all members of our tribes are safe, nor should we allow damaging people to remain in our lives.

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Finale

This is the third foundational essay for this newsletter. Last week we covered the limitations of the brain’s ability to take in information, process it, and then use it. The next foundational essay will discuss how we are influenced by the behaviors of those around us. It’s a fascinating and surprising topic.

Exercises

To be done when you are in a non-distracting environment.

• What tribe has brought you the most benefit in life?

• What tribe has brought you the most misery?

• Name a step that you can take to strengthen your family tribe.

• Name a member of one of your tribes that you should distance yourself from.

In Closing

Thank you for visiting today. This was a large topic so congratulations for making it to the end. If you found this newsletter interesting, subscribe by clicking the button below. Please like, comment, and share to support this newsletter. If you have any friends or family who might find this content interesting please recommend this newsletter to them.

Your friend,

DJ

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I didn’t expect to have paying subscribers so soon. Thank you for your support and encouragement. It means a lot. These Behind the Curtain posts are exclusive to paid subscribers as a small thanks for your support. This newsletter is trying to offer something original and interesting. It wouldn’t be possible without your support.

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Welcome!

This is the second, and key, essay in the foundation series on human behavior. In the first foundation essay, Why “Seeing The Mountain”?, we covered the many ways a metaphorical mountain can be viewed and understood. In this essay we introduce:

• The enormous amount of information that is available to us

• How imperfectly we take in that information

• How we store that information

• How well we remember that information

• How well we recount that information when needed

Much of human behavior that mystifies us is rooted in our imperfect recollection of incomplete information, and how we make (often subconscious) decisions as a result.

What we cover today will be the basis for upcoming essays on human behavior that will empower you and improve your understanding of those in your life.

Infinite information and the finite brain

The Earth’s surface is about 196.9 million square miles (510.1 million kilometers) while the typical person will only travel 30,000-50,000 miles (50,000-80,000 kilometers) in their lifetime; much of that over the same paths. Most people have not visited more than 10 of the 200 countries on the planet with almost 1 in 5 having never left their own country. Over a lifetime the typical person will have personally met less than 0.01% of the world’s population (estimates and individual experiences vary widely).

That’s our experience on this planet. The Earth is ~7,918 miles (12,742 kilometers) in diameter. It’s one of 8 planets revolving around our star (the sun). There are 100,000,000,000 to 400,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy and possibly over 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the observable universe. It’s unknown how large the actual universe may be.

As for the accumulated knowledge on the planet, there have been over 134,000,000 books published. In one minute, over 500 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube, over 66,000 pictures uploaded to Instagram, 1,700,000 posts to Facebook, 16,000,000 texts sent, and 231,400,000 emails sent (2022).

Your knowledge and experience, which have taken you this far, are an insignificant sliver of all that can be known. That’s also true for the other 8,000,000,000 people on the planet. The most educated and experienced person in the world is still left with an insignificant sliver of knowledge. Yet, that sliver of knowledge we each possess is valuable and, working together, humanity is making enormous progress.

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The amazing brain

Our brain weights about 3 pounds (1.4 kg). In that brain there are about 86 billion neurons and about that many glial cells, which support the neurons. The brain collects its information from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touch, body position, temperature, and pain (there are more senses under certain definitions). Here are some of the biological limitations for the first four senses listed…

Seeing the world

Our eyes can see photon wavelengths from 380 nanometers to 720 nanometers. Wavelengths range from a few trillionths of a meter to several kilometers, so what we see is just a tiny fraction of the information available.

The typical person can perceive about 1 million unique colors. A few gifted individuals, tetrachromats, have a genetic mutation that allows them to see 100 million colors while a few less gifted individuals can only see 10,000 different colors.

But humans don’t have the best eyesight on the planet.

A gecko can see color 350 times better at night than a human. An owl can see objects in 1/100th the light than a human. A wedge-tailed eagle can spot a rabbit from thousands of feet away. The bald eagle’s vision is 7-8 times sharper than a human’s. Genetically, we are only able to perceive a fraction of the visual information around us.

Hearing the world

The typical human ear can hear vibrations from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz and that range shrinks as we age. A dog can hear up to 45,000 hertz and a cat can hear up to 64,000 hertz. Wolves can hear sounds up to 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. Sadly, the hearing capability we do have, declines as we age. Even those born with perfect pitch see their capabilities maddeningly change as they enter middle age.

Smelling the world

Humans have a very strong sense of smell. We can detect up to 1 trillion distinct smells. While humans are capable of distinguishing many scents, many animals are able to detect weaker scents. African Giant Pouched Rats are used to smell for landmines and to detect tuberculosis in lab samples. The Great White Shark can smell 1 drop of blood in 10,000,000,000 drops of water. A bloodhound can trail a scent that’s 13 days old and can follow a scent up to 130 miles. An African Elephant, the animal with the strongest sense of smell, can smell water up to 12 miles (19.2 kilometers) away.

Tasting the world

Compared to the other senses, it’s much harder to compare a human’s sense of taste versus that of various animals. Evolutionarily, taste developed to identify potentially dangerous food we shouldn’t eat and to identify foods with needed nutrients.

By the numbers, humans have between 2000-8000 taste buds; each with 50-150 taste receptor cells. Catfish have around 100,000 taste receptors on their body. Cows have up to 35,000 taste buds and octopus have around 200 suckers, each with 10,000 taste receptors.

However the sense of taste is intertwined with the sense of smell. Our sense of smell accounts for 80% of what we taste. Our brains combine the chemical information from what our noses detect with the chemical information from our tongues related to salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami (some sources identify more taste types). The information from the two senses are then coalesced into a ‘flavor’ of what we’re eating.

Larry Lanouette temporarily lost his sense of smell due to the effects of chemotherapy. Anosmia significantly altered his sense of taste and his ability to enjoy eating. He tried to draw on his memory to make eating more pleasant.

“When I’d eat food, I remembered what it was supposed to taste like, but it was a total illusion,” he said. “Eating became something I had to do because I needed to, not because it was an enjoyable experience.”

It should be no surprise that, like our other senses, our ability to taste also changes as we age.

In recent years, researchers are finding that humans (and other animals) have sensors in their guts that notify the brain that amino acids and fatty acids have been consumed and to seek out more of what contained those nutrients. It’s a taste that’s at the below conscious level.

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Absorbing the information

Earthly Delights

With My Own Eyes

Some years ago, I visited Munich’s Lenbachhaus, home to an incredible collection of Blaue Reiter paintings. A group of German teenagers continually interrupted my encounters with the Kandinskys and Franz Marcs as they sped through the galleries, taking cell phone pictures of each painting as if they were trying to catch ‘em all…

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3 years ago · 49 likes · 21 comments · Robert Walrod

Now that we’ve covered what information is available and what we can detect of it, we’ll delve into what the brain is able to retain and remember.

The brain has a limited capability of taking in information and analyzing it. In this video, there are eight basketball players passing the ball around. Can you accurately count how many passes were made by the players wearing white? On my first try, I missed one though I thought I was carefully counting. Can you count them all?

Our brains are incapable of processing everything we sense; even when we focus intently on a short video. Our brains consume a lot of energy. They account for only 2% of our mass but consume 20% of our energy (calories). The body’s ability to fuel the brain remains constant so the brain adjusts to higher processing needs by ignoring information it deems irrelevant. As you watched the video, the brain ignored everything but the players in white.

'Our findings suggest that the brain does indeed allocate less energy to the neurons that respond to information outside the focus of our attention when our task becomes harder. 

'This explains why we experience inattentional blindness and deafness even to critical information that we really want to be aware of.' 

If you’re threatened, your vision narrows and your hearing drops away. When you’re anxious or panicked, which requires a lot of energy, the brain becomes less able to think clearly. In some extreme moments, conscious thought can nearly cease and the limbic system is left to “run the show”. This is sometimes referred to as a mental freeze (which can sometimes protect you from the full effects of trauma).

Memory processing

In addition to being limited to the amount of information we can take in, we have a limited ability to retain that information in our memory. Without resorting to memory tricks that bring assistance from other parts of our brain, we can briefly retain about 7 pieces of information in working memory — such as a phone number or a list of ingredients. And that can fade away in as quick as 20 seconds. This function is similar to how a computer uses RAM to process information before being transferred to a storage device/drive or discarded.

During the course of the day your brain accumulates bits and bobs of information in the hippocampus and when we sleep it gets transferred to more permanent storage. Good sleep can improve the retention of facts 20-40%.

WARNING: This section on memory processing is only a bare introduction into the basic concept of how memory works. Academic research into memory has differing models on how memory is believed to work and these models use differing terminology. If this area interests you, I suggest researching the topic on your own for a more thorough and balanced take on the field.

Memory retention

Our memory is a sieve. Synapses rewire and die as well as brain cells dying and new cells being created. Memories fade faster than most people realize. Roughly 30% is lost in the first two hours after learning and over 40% is lost in one day.

Research on memory continues to unfold, but what we do know is that memory is fallible, and shockingly so. Most of our most cherished memories are confabulations, an intricate blend of fragments from our past, images from dreams, movies, books, and even other people’s memories assimilated as our own. This is the fantastic, frustrating, perplexing nature of memory: It is endlessly redefining and refining what we remember. Ask three siblings about a shared experience and you are likely to get three different versions of the event.

To compensate for missing and lost information, the brain inserts created information in the gaps. It uses your experience to insert pieces that make sense to the memory. It might insert a snippet from another memory or it will insert a piece of what somebody else said happen.

In one study on the audience-tuning effect, participants watched a video of a bar fight. In the video, two intoxicated men get into a physical confrontation after one man has argued with his friend, and the other has seen his favourite football team lose a match. Afterwards, participants were asked to tell a stranger what they had seen.

The study’s participants were split into two groups. One group was told that the stranger disliked one of the two fighters in the video. The other group was told that the stranger liked this same fighter. Unsurprisingly, this extra information shaped how people described the video to the stranger. Participants gave more negative accounts of the behaviour of the fighter if they believed the stranger disliked him.

More importantly though, the way people told their story later affected the way they remembered the fighter’s behaviour. When participants later tried to remember the fight in a neutral, unbiased way, the two groups still gave somewhat differing accounts of what had happened, mirroring the attitude of their original audience. To an extent, these participants’ stories had become their memories.

Our memories are not like a recording, but more like pieces of a puzzle that are cobbled together.

Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording.”

Another memory phenomena is “blocking”. You may retain a memory, or a reasonable facsimile of one, yet not be able to immediately retrieve that memory. You’ve experienced this when you couldn’t immediately remember a song title, singer, or actor when telling a story but later remembered it on the drive home.

Putting this all together

To summarize, we are exposed to an infinitesimally small percentage of the available information in the universe. Of the information we are exposed to, we are only able to absorb a sliver of that information. Of the information we absorb, we retain only a small percentage of that, and we fill in the blanks with manufactured information. Then much of that is lost over time. With what remains we need the experience and tools to make the best use of it. As we are human, we’ll do that imperfectly.

Finale

In the first foundational essay we discussed the many different ways our metaphorical mountain can be viewed. In this essay we discussed the enormity of that mountain and why we are unable to see much of it. The next essay in this foundational series is on how we use groups to fill in the gaps of what we don’t know and the associated challenges. With society becoming increasingly siloed and isolated, group dynamics are becoming increasing impactful on society; making this upcoming essay particularly useful.

Exercises

To be done when you are in a non-distracting environment.

• Think of a time when a major problem arose because you thought you had all the needed information, but didn’t.

• How has that experience affected your decisions going forward?

• Identify a key piece of information you’re missing for a needed decision.

• What options do you have to fill in that knowledge gap?

In Closing

Thank you for visiting today. If you found this newsletter interesting, subscribe by clicking the button below. Please like, comment, and share to support this newsletter. If you have any friends or family who might find this content interesting please recommend this newsletter to them.

Your friend,

DJ

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