History, behaviour and Spinzoa.

I remember the moment when I was reading Spinoza’s Ethics and it finally made sense.

I was sitting in the round reading room of King’s College, London’s library (the old Public Records Office), and after weeks of feeling like my brain was not getting it, not working hard enough, it finally clicked. It happened once I had reached the end of part one for the second time. If you don’t know it, part one is ‘Of God’, and in many ways is the most (im)famous part of that book. It is the part of the Ethics that encouraged Einstein to say, when asked if he believed in God, that he believes in Spinoza’s God.

At the time I was studying Early Modern History, and I spent the best part of that year reading and thinking about the changing religious views of sixteenth and seventeenth Europe, and Italy in particular, and how history is told (my dissertation was on Bernardinho Ochino of Siena). For obvious reasons, part one was pretty relevant.

But in discovering the whole of Spinoza, I found a system of logic, understanding and ethics that I continue to find profound, relevant and important. Bertrand Russell, in The History of Western Philosophy, called him “the noblest and most loveable of the great philosophers.” And whilst I focussed on part one back then, I can understand why.

I am now studying for a very different Masters degree, this time on a somewhat newer subject: behavioural science. And yet I find the man again. All over the place.

Whether it is Daniel Gilbert on ‘How mental systems believe’ and Antonio Damasio on ‘The Feeling Brain’, who reference him very specifically, or George Lowenstein on ‘Risk as Feeling’ who is clearly influenced by his approach, some of the biggest names in behavioural science are proving the thought of that seventeenth century outsider to be correct.

The key section in this instance is Part 2 — ‘On Nature and the Origin of the Mind’. The seemingly simple, but genuinely challenging, argument is about how we feel and believe. Spinoza steadily dismantles the Cartesian view that people think of an idea or concept first, and then decide whether they believe it is true or not. Instead he suggests that in the very act of imagining or feeling, we believe something to be true. It is only once we have created that truth, that we then think whether we are going to endorse it.

To use the system 1/ system 2 structure popularised by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, Descartes suggests that we use S2 almost exclusively. Spinoza describes a process where S1 kicks in before we have even noticed it is happening, and then we follow that up with S2.

This gets more challenging the more you think about it. As Gilbert (who I have heavily used in this piece) writes:

“Indeed, Spinoza argued that one need not even distinguish between mere ideas and beliefs — because all ideas are beliefs.”

I reference a small number of articles below which go into the science that is proving this to be true, but one really crucial element he identified is worth highlighting, that all of the literature around salience now supports: doubt is effortful and we don’t like it.

There is one obvious public policy implication of this: we spend far too much energy and effort on education and information campaigns as a way to get people to do things — eat less, smoke less, pay taxes, vote, volunteer, give to charity, support our elderly neighbours — and nowhere near enough on work which accepts that people are unthinkingly applying their beliefs before that information gets to them. In whatever realm of our choices one wants to consider, we are not rational Cartesian beings and never have been.

If you want an argument that will encourage you to pay more attention to the findings of modern behavioural science, all you to do need is to read some Spinoza. Stick with it, you’ll probably find something else of use in there too.

References

Bernard, W. (1972) Spinoza’s Influence on the Rise of Scientific Psychology: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Psychology. Journal of the History of Behavioral Science, 8: 208–15.

Dolan, P. et al. (2012). Influencing Financial Behaviour: From Changing Minds to Changing Contexts. Journal of Behavioral Finance 13(2): 126–42.

Gilbert, D.T. (1991). How Mental Systems Believe, American Psychologist 46(2): 107–119.

Kahneman, D. (2012). Thinking, fast and slow, London: Penguin.

Loewenstein, G.F. et al. (2001). Risk as feelings. Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 267–286.

Rabin, M. (2013). Healthy habits: some thoughts on the role of public policy in healthful eating and exercise under limited rationality. In Oliver, A. (ed.), Behavioural Public Policy, 115–139, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.